God and man [microform]

of CblcaQO
KHbrarics

GOD AND MAN

By the Same Author

PRINCIPLES AND
PRECEPTS

Second Edition

IDEAS AND IDEALS
Each 6s. net.

GOD AMD MAN

By HASTINGS RASIIDALL

D.D., D.C.L., D.Litl, F.B.A.
Sometime Dean of Carlisle

Selected and Edited
By H. D. A. MAJOR, D.D., F.S.A.
Principal of Ripon Hall, Oxford

And F. L. CROSS, M.A., B.Sc.
Librarian of Pusey House

BASIL BLACKWELL

OXFORD

1930

Made and Printed in Great Britain at the KEMP HAM. PRESS LIMITEB-
in the Citv of Oxford

CONTENTS

PAGE

PREFACE 7

I. THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM 13

II. CHRIST AS THE LOGOS AND THE SON OF GOD 68

311. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS 79

JV. TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE FROM ST. ATHANA-
SIUS TO ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 103

V. THE MORAL ARGUMENT FOR PERSONAL

IMMORTALITY 122

VI. WHAT IS JUSTICE ? I. THE THEORY OF

EQUALITY 145

Til. WHAT IS JUSTICE ? II. THE THEORY OF

REWARD l68

Till. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 189

IX. NICOLAS DE ULTRICURIA, A MEDIEVAL

HUME 2O3

X. BISHOP BUTLER 231

XI. THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH 253

PREFACE

THE editors have given the title God and Man to
their third volume of RashdaU's papers and sermons,
because those collected here deal with different
aspects of the relation of man to the Creator and
bear upon problems which arise in connexion with
the Incarnation. No apology is needed for making
such a collection. RashdaU's theology was through
and through Incarnational. He stood in the line of
Robertson of Brighton and F. D. Maurice ; and in
his presentation of Christ's work and person carried
forward the movement which, in response to modern
needs and modern knowledge, seeks to rationalise
and moralise the Christian doctrine. It was his
intention to write a treatise which should deal at
length with the Idea of the Incarnation, but his
comparatively early death deprived theology of this
work. It is hoped that this loss may be repaired to
some small extent by the papers contained in the
present volume.

What will always remain RashdaU's theological
opus magnum 1 had the Atonement for its theme.
His treatment of this subject was naturaUy critical,
for he was constantly led to attack doctrines of
the Atonement which appeared to him antiquated
and immoral. The consequence is that those who
know RashdaU as a theologian only from these
lectures sometimes suppose that his interests centred
in the demoUtion of theological crudities, and that
he had little interest in constructing a tenable
theology to put in its place.

Nothing could be further from the truth. RashdaU
was one of the few constructive theologians of our
age. He was fuUy alive to the crisis in which the
inherited theology was placed by the new discoveries
in Natural Science and Biblical Research, and to the
need for a new apologetic. Unlike many of his

1 The Idea of Atonement in Christian Theology. The Bampton Lectures
for 1915. First edition, London, 1919.

PREFACE

-contemporaries, he was not content merely with
adjusting the ancient theology in order to render it
reconcilable with the new knowledge. Still less, like
the French? Modernists, did he go to the other
extreme of rejecting dogmatic theology altogether.
He aimed at constructing a theology of the Incarna-
tion which should be based on the firm rock of
enlightened reason and morality, and at showing -that
such a theology lay at the root of the Christian
religion.

It was natural that Rashdall should have studied
carefully the work of others who had attempted the
task before him. Through his historical work on the
Medieval Universities, he had been brought into
intimate touch with the great Scholastic thinkers,
and found that he had much in common with the
spirit of the thirteenth century. He was attracted
by the intellectual freedom and speculative daring of
its theologians, and in particular he was drawn to
the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas by the stress
which it laid upon the supremacy of the intellect.
He was aware, of course, of the limitations from
which the Scholastics inevitably suffered, but he
realised that they succeeded in offering to their age
what he wished to offer to the Modern World a
theological system in which the Christian Faith and
the best current philosophy were united in perfect
harmony. If Rashdall had been asked to name the
other period in European culture to which he was
most attracted, he would probably have said the
eighteenth century. He admired its sanity and its
common sense. And from Berkeley's Principles of
Human Knowledge he largely derived his idealistic
metaphysic. Both these affinities are exemplified by
the historical papers included in this volume.

It was in morality that Rashdall found the ulti-
mate basis of the Christian life. Individual ethical

S

PRE FACE

progress, not pantheistic metaphysical absorption,
Tvas the business of human souls. The complete
accord between the claims of conscience and the
ethics of the Gospel was for him the bed-rock of
Christian apologetic. Christ is discovered to be the
highest ethical ideal, and the individual shares in the
Divine Revelation made in the Incarnate Son of God
~by following His example. All external rites
which Rashdall, incidentally, always treated with
conscientious reverence J were subservient to the
moral life. The life and death of Christ together
constituted the supreme example for the Christian
"believer, and being " a member of Christ " meant
for him primarily the willingness to follow that ideal.
The first duty, therefore, of the believer who has
accepted the Christian revelation is to study the life
of Christ, and to behold in this concrete example
the moral end. Such study will yield principles of
universal application. Christ taught, and followed,
principles which transcended His precepts, 2 and for
us to live the Christian life means not a mere slavish
obedience to these precepts, but to live and act in
accordance with those general principles which are
reflected in Christ's teaching and example.

Further, Rashdall had a profound distrust of
Mysticism in all its forms. It was only with the turn
of the present century that a new value began to be
discovered in the writings of the mystics. Through
the researches of the Dean of St. Paul's (Dr. Inge),
William James, Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, and
Evelyn Underbill, it has become generally recognised
that the mystics had not had nearly the attention
paid to them which was their due. Unfortunately
the discovery of these new treasures led many writers
to pit mystic experience against reasoned conviction

1 Cf. the volume of sermons entitled Christus in Ecclesia (T. & T. Clark,
1904).

2 Cf. the sermon entitled " Principles or Precepts ? " in Principles and
Precepts (Basil Blackwell, 1927).

PREFACE

in religion. Rashdall believed that here was an
irreconcilable antithesis, and with his unflinching
confidence in Reason he was led to distrust all those
who used religious experience as the basis of a new
theistic apologetic. His essay entitled " The Valid-
ity of Religious Experience " in Ideas and Ideals* is
deserving of careful study in this connexion. His
distrust of Mysticism was further increased by the
apologetic use made of it by William James in
support of Pragmatism for Rashdall the worst of
all heresies. Yet another reason for his distrust of
Mysticism was that it seemed to him to imperil the
permanence of the individual. He strongly dissented
from Hegelianism, because it tended to endanger the
reality of the self and to engulf every finite difference
in an all-inclusive Absolute. The mystics claimed
that through the flight of the Alone to the Alone
they could enter the Divine Mind and share the
Divine Experience ; and this claim seemed to
Rashdall incompatible with the demands of
individual morality, both here and hereafter.

These considerations throw much light on Rash-
dalTs attitude to the doctrine of the Trinity. He
constantly reiterated his conviction several in-
stances occur in the present volume that a Trini-
tarian doctrine of Three Persons, using the word
Person in a sense identical with its modern meaning,
implied a society of three independent self-conscious
Beings, that is, a tritheistic view of the Godhead.
As against Sabellianism, he contended for the per-
manence of the distinctions within the Godhead ; but
by reason of his doctrine that selves are always
mutually exclusive he was unable to accept a doctrine
of the mutual interpenetration of three separate
Divine Personalities, such as has appealed to many
theologians.

For the production of this trilogy of RashdalTs

1 Published by Basil Blackwell, 1928.
10

PREFACE

occasional writings, the editors have had had a vast
amount of material from which to draw. They have
had at their disposal something like a thousand
sermons and a hundred papers, by far the greater
part of which material still remains unpublished.
Much of the writing and preaching of Rashdall was
occasioned by events and controversies which have
by this tune been forgotten. It is the characteristic
of a truly philosophic mind to be able to bring wide
principles to bear on the needs of the moment, and
herein Rashdall was eminently successful. He was
an untiring controversialist, because he found con-
troversy to be one of the best ways in which to
reach truth. The result is that some of RashdalTs
best papers were orientated too much on past
controversies to justify their being reprinted to-day.
In other cases, there were controversial papers that
seemed too valuable to omit, and yet it was clear
that large sections of them would have occasioned
little interest at the present time. The editors have
not hesitated to eliminate these controversial pas-
sages where it could be done without modification of
the argument. After all it was the principles that
lay behind these controversies for which Rashdall
was really concerned. Of Rashdall, it might be said,
as of " the judicious Hooker/' that he was not so
anxious to prove his opponents wrong as to show
why they were wrong. In an age such as the
present when systematic thinkers who aim at a
philosophic and rational defence of the Christian
religion, are few, those who have set their hand to-
this task are deserving of serious attention.

Most of the essays in the present volume have
been printed, at least in substance, before, but we
have received a number of requests expressing a
desire to have some of them in a more accessible
form. The first is reprinted from the collective
volume Contentio Veritatis by kind permission of the

ir

PREFACE

publisher, John Murray. Nos. II, III, IV and X
liave appeared in the Modern Churchman. The
University of London Press has generously consented
to the republication of No. V from King's College
Lectures on Immortality, edited by Professor W. R.
Matthews. Nos. VI and VII are from the Economic
Review by permission of its editor, the Rev. John
Carter. The somewhat technical essay on Nicholas
of Ultricuria appeared originally in the Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, of which Society RashdaU
was for some years President ; for this essay the
editors of this collection are indebted to the author-
ities of the Aristotelian Society. The concluding
essay is from Jesus Human and Divine which was
published in 1922 ; for this they have to thank the
publishers, Messrs. Andrew Melrose.

H. D. A. MAJOR.

Oxford, F. L. CROSS.

March, 1930.

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM
I. INTRODUCTION

THEISM * is not the whole of Christianity, but Theism,
of the Christian type is a very large and important
part of it. It is, I believe, more and more coming to-
be true that men's attitude towards Christianity is
determined mainly by their attitude towards Theism.
That this is so is due partly to a change in what they
mean by Theism, partly to a change in their inter-
pretation of Christianity. 2 At the present day minds-
capable of religious feeling naturally turn towards
Christianity, conceived as a religion of enthusiastic
loyalty towards the Person and the ethical ideal of
the historical Jesus, with sympathy and yearning.
The human side of Christianity is readily accepted.
But to many minds it is just the view of the nature

1 [Theism is the belief that God is the ultimate ground of all things and
is the source of all things other than Himself and sustains a personal
relation to His creatures.] EDD.

8 A Deism of. the eighteenth-century type might be, and often was,
entirely divorced from the Christian attitude towards God. Such a Deism
was compatible with an almost entire extinction of the religious emotions^
a morality which found no contact with religion except in the form of
purely external " sanctions," and which sometimes dispensed even with
the sanctions, so that belief in a future life disappeared altogether. Its
view of the relation between God and the world made worship an absurdity,
or at least a superfluity ; its cold and critical temper was content to
regard the great historical religions in general, and Christianity in particu-
lar, as artificially invented impostures, or at least as the creations of an
irrational " enthusiasm." On the other hand, while Christianity was
regarded either as a supernaturally authenticated guarantee of " Natural
Religion," or as a supernaturally authenticated appendix of rigid and
admittedly unintelligible dogma, it was clear that the distinctively Christian
elements of Religion might easily be sloughed off and leave the underlying.
Deism just where it was before.

These remarks are meant to apply to the type of thought combated by
Bishop Butler in the Analogy. But Deism was a word vaguely used, and
was often applied by opponents to latitudinarian Churchmen like Arch-
bishop Tillotson. To many even of the avowed " Deists " the preceding
description would be quite inapplicable. Their Deism often amounted to
Theism in the sense of this Essay, though their empirical Philosophy led
them to exaggerate the separateness of God from the universe.

GODANDMAN

of God which Christianity presupposes that creates
intellectual difficulties. Once a Theism of the Christ-
ian type has been accepted, the way is prepared for
the ascription of a unique position in the religious
history of the world to Him who was at once the first
.great teacher of that Theism, and the supreme em-
bodiment of the ethical ideal which has historically
been associated with it. I do not mean to say that
there remain no difficulties and perplexities either in
the traditional dogmas about the Person of Christ or
about the miraculous element in the narratives of
his life. I do not mean to say that there does not
remain an important difference between a Unitarian-
ism or Christian Theism of the modern type and a
Catholicism or Trinitarianism of the kind which
seeks to place itself in harmony with modern modes
of thought. But I do believe that the difference
between what one may vaguely call an inside attitude
and an outside attitude (whether sympathetic or
unsympathetic) towards the Christian Faith is com-
ing more and more to depend upon the view that is
taken of Theism. Especially is this the case with
minds which have passed through the discipline of
Philosophy, and with whom (for the most part) the
.alternative to Christian Theism is not a blank
Materialism, or a confident Agnosticism, but a
Theism of a vague, impersonal type, exhibiting
-every shade of thought and feeling intermediate
between a very real belief that the ultimate principle
of things is spiritual and a Pantheism which for
every religious and ethical purpose is indistinguish-
able from the purest Naturalism.

I propose in the following pages to try, in a
systematic but necessarily very brief and imperfect
manner, to suggest what is implied in the Theism
presupposed by Christianity ; and this may best be
done by indicating the grounds on which, as I believe,
such a Theism rests. And here we are at once met
by a diniculty. The strongest argument for Theism

34

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

is, in its fully developed form, a metaphysical
argument. To some minds this will be thought to
amount to an admission that such a Theism can
never be the religion of the modern world. How, it
may be said, is Christianity to be accepted by the
world in general, if it is impossible to be a Christian
on any rational grounds without first being a meta-
physician ? Does not this involve, as a necessary
consequence, that Christianity must be possible only
on the one hand for a small circle of professed
metaphysical students, and on the other for those
who are content to accept then: religion on authority ?
We need not shrink from the admission that for large
numbers of people almost wholly, and for nearly all
to some extent, religious belief must rest upon
authority, though it will never rest entirely upon
authority. For people will not accept upon author-
ity what does not meet the needs of their own moral
and rational nature ; and the fact that a creed does
meet their needs is, as far as it goes, an argument.
And it were much to be desired that some meta-
physical training should be diffused among a much
larger number of people than now enjoy it, especially
among those who are concerned with the teaching of
Religion in a sceptical age. A certain elementary
course of metaphysical reading might well be recom-
mended to all well-educated people who feel the need
of getting at the real grounds upon which religious
belief must rest, and might be still more widely
recommended had our philosophers learnt how to
imitate the lucidity of the old English philosophical
Classics without reproducing their metaphysical
mistakes. But the main reply to the objection above
indicated is that there is no absolute line of demar-
cation between the kind of arguments upon which
theistic belief is based in thoughtful men who have
never studied formal metaphysics and the arguments
of the professed metaphysician. All men who think
about things in general are metaphysicians more or

15

GOD AND MAN

less. The plain man who has never opened a book
of geometry, or even of arithmetic, has nevertheless
some ideas about space and quantity or number, and
those ideas are mathematical ideas. And so, the-
metaphysician is simply the man who thinks out the-
problems about which all who think about things in
general have thought to some extent, who thinks
them out in a more thorough and systematic manner
than other people, and who has acquainted himself
with the best that has been thought and written
about such subjects by others.

I believe therefore that I shall best serve my
purpose by not shrinking from the attempt to
express, in the most popular and untechnical way
that is possible, what I believe the Theistic argument
comes to when it is fully thought out. It must be
admitted that to acquire the metaphysical attitude
of mind, to see clearly what the ultimate meta-
physical question means, and fully to grasp any
possible answer to it, generally requires a rather long
course of gradual habituation. But I trust that
some who may not be prepared to accept the par-
ticular line of argument which will be here offered in
its full extent, may nevertheless be able to accept it
sufficiently to acquiesce in the religious or theological
part of my conclusion. If that should be so, it will
not mean that they have substituted some false or
merely plausible grounds of belief for the true ones,
or allowed their creed to be dictated by authority or
emotion or prejudice. For, as has been suggested,
the common-sense arguments for theistic belief are,
as I believe, only the metaphysical arguments im-
perfectly thought out. It is needless to say that
such a statement of my argument as is possible within
the limits of this book will fail to satisfy the professed
metaphysician. It is not so much, however, in
the statement of an argument as in the reply to
objections that it is difficult to combine meta-
physical thoroughness and accuracy with general

16

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

intelligibility. I must therefore appeal to the benevo-
lence of the metaphysical reader (if such there should
be), and ask him to believe that I am not unaware of
the existence of many possible objections which I am
obliged to pass over, and that I have no desire to slur
over or minimise them.

I may add that there is nothing in the argument
which pretends to be in any way new. The greater
part of it is simply the common property of all
thorough-going Idealists. If in some parts of the
argument I adopt a position which will not commend
itself to all genuinely theistic Idealists, I venture to
hope that my differences from them will be for the
most part a difference of emphasis rather than a,
fundamental difference of principle. It will be un-
necessary to specify my obligations to the acknow-
ledged masters to whose inspiration is due anything
in these pages that merits attention.

II. A SHORT STATEMENT OF THE IDEALISTIC ARGU-
MENT FOR THEISM

To the " plain man " it usually appears self-evident
that matter is a thing which exists " in itself," which
could conceivably be supposed to exist even if no
consciousness existed or ever had existed in the
world. He may, indeed, if he is a Theist, disbelieve
that matter does exist or ever has, as a matter of
actual fact, existed without mind ; he may even go
so far as to say that it is unthinkable that matter
should in the first instance have come into existence
without mind, or that the Mind which brought it
into existence should cease to exist ; but, if all mind
in the Universe could be supposed to be suddenly
extinguished, there would appear to him nothing
essentially absurd or self-contradictory in the idea
that matter would go on existing all the same. That
is the notion which lies at the root of all difficulties
about Theism. The denial of this view of things is

B 17

GODANDMAN

what is meant by Idealism : and Idealism is, as I
"believe, the necessary basis of Theism for minds
which want to get to the bottom of things.

The line of thought which leads to the adoption of
this view may best be mastered by a perusal of
Bishop Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge.
However much Bishop Berkeley's argument requires
to be corrected by the criticism of that later form of
Idealism which begins with Kant, his writings remain
the classical expression of the view which all genuine
Idealists agree in accepting as the basis of a true
theory of the Universe the view that " matter " or
" things " exist only in mind or " for " mind, that the
idea of matter without mind is an unthinkable
absurdity. I will here attempt only a very brief
resume of Bishop Berkeley's line of thought, advising
the reader not previously acquainted with meta-
physics to read Berkeley for himself, if he wishes to
understand it thoroughly, and to meet with a fuller
answer to the objections which will inevitably occur
to him. 1

The plain man (and the most accomplished non-
metaphysical man of science will probably for the
present purpose be only too eager to place himself on
the side of the plain man) declares to us that matter
exists " in itself," and that it is " in itself " exactly
what he thinks it to be. He sees before him a tree,
and he tells us that the tree is just what it appears to
him to be. Very well, the tree appears to him green.
" Is the tree green in itself ? " " Yes," says the first
thought of the plain man, " of course the tree is
really green in itself." " Then supposing no being
endowed with an eye had ever existed in the world,
supposing no spiritual being had ever felt or seen
what we feel and see when we look upon a wood in

1 A more mature statement of his view is contained in the Dialogues of
Hylas and, Philonous. To the reader who wishes to appreciate the advance
which modern Idealism has made upon Berkeley without grappling with
the difficulties of Kant, Fenier's Institutes of Metaphysics may be com-
mended.

18

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

early summer, the tree would still be green ? " Here
probably our plain friend will begin to hesitate ; but,
if he has a tincture of science, he will probably mur-
mur something about rays of light or waves of ether,
some of which are absorbed by the tree and others
thrown back into space rays which are there all the
same whether they actually strike a living optic
nerve or not. And then we shall have to point out
that waves of ether are one thing ; the idea of
" green " is something quite different. A man blind
from his birth may know all about waves and ether
and optic nerves ; he may pass a brilliant examina-
tion in the science of optics, but he has no idea of
what the seeing man means by a sensation of green.
And then probably our plain man will be ready to
confess that the colour and the sound and the smell
of external objects do not (in strictness of speech)
exist in the bodies, but are effects produced by the
bodies upon mind ; the ideas of " secondary qual-
ities " (as Locke called them) exist only in the mind,
but the " primary qualities " the size, the shape,
the solidity of things these, he will still insist, are
in the things ; and the " secondary qualities " are
really certain modifications of the primary qualities
(i.e. of the arrangement of the ultimate particles of
matter) which produce the ideas of colour, sound,
etc., in my mind. The primary qualities are in the
things : but how do I know they are there ? When
I say that the paper before me is square, all that I
can really mean is that the white appearance in my
mind is of this shape, and that if I touch it I shall
likewise find my tactual impressions arranged in a
certain way. When I say that it is thin, I can mean
only that on holding it up edgeways the edge is seen
or felt to be thin. When I say it is solid, I mean
that I cannot see or touch the table underneath it
without removing it or making a hole in it. " Then
do you mean," it may be objected, " that the paper
Ms no existence when I leave the room ? " Certainly

GOD AND MAN

not, for in the first place I can still think of it, and by
being thought of by me, it has (Berkeley would say)
" entered my mind and become an idea " x ; and
when I so think it, I can only think of it as some-
thing which I should see and feel under certain
conditions if I came back into the room and no one
had removed it. But it would certainly be meaning-
less to say that it exists if nobody ever had or ever
would either see or think of it as being seen. This
line of thought may possibly bring our plain man to
the admission that what we experience immediately
is simply certain feelings, which, when being reflected
on, are built up into objects of thought ; that, do
what we will, we cannot get outside our thoughts.
By inference we may, indeed, come to believe that
other people also have similar feelings and know
similar objects : nay, when we make abstraction of
the thinker and concentrate our attention only on
the thing thought of the matter or " content " of
the thought, as it is called we may very probably
assert that when you and I both think of this sheet
of paper, or of paper in general, we are thinking about
the same thing. But still the " thing " can only mean
what we think of, what we should experience under
certain conditions, or what somebody else might
think of or experience under certain circumstances.

Our plain man will now perhaps be disposed to-
admit that immediately we are in contact only with
ideas, or rather, as Berkeley's critics rightly insist,,
with " objects of thought " ; but he will go on to-
evade the force of the admission by contending that
though primary qualities, no less than secondary, are
found on reflection to be known by us simply as
objects of our thought, as something inside our
minds, yet the things as they are in themselves are

1 It is true that Berkeley did not sufficiently distinguish this existence-
for thought, which it has equally whether I am looking at it or merely
thinking it, from the actual perception of it when it is present, and prepared
the way for Hume's attempt to reduce the memory of a sensation to a.
" less lively " idea or feeling of the same kind.

20

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

xeally like the things that we know, that the primary
qualities as they present themselves to my mind are
really like the primary qualities as they would still
be in the things were there no thought or conscious-
ness whatever in the world. To this we may reply
in the words of Berkeley : " But, say you, though
the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind,
yet there may be things like them, whereof they are
copies or resemblances, which things exist without
the mind in an unthinking substance. I answer, an
idea can be like nothing but an idea ; a colour or
figure can be like nothing but another colour or
figure. If we look but never so little into our own
thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to con-
ceive a likeness except only between our ideas.
Again, I ask whether those supposed originals or
external things, of which our ideas are the pictures
or representations, be themselves perceivable or no ?
If they are, then they are ideas, and we have gained
our point ; but if you think they are not, I appeal to
anyone whether it be sense to assert a colour is like
something which is invisible ; hard or soft, like
something which is intangible ; and so of the rest." 1
Another way of illustrating the essentially un-
meaning character of saying that things apart from
thought are " in themselves " what they are to the
thinking mind, is to call attention to the essentially
relative character of these primary qualities which
we are so apt to think of as existing hi the supposed
" things in themselves," of which we can give no
account except that they are not the same things as
those we think. The quality which is most apt to
force itself upon us as something which belongs to
the things and not to our thought of them is the
quality of solidity ; and, whatever else solidity may
mean, I suppose everyone will admit that the pro-
perty of occupying space is an essential element in
it. Without pressing the question what exactly can

1 Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, 8.

21

GOD AND MAN

be meant by " occupying," it is enough to take the
bare idea of spaciality. " Things in themselves "
are, it is contended, in space, and would be still in
space though thought were to perish out of the
universe. What, then, we must insist, is meant by
the " spaciality," the size, the shape, etc., of the
things which occupy space ? Whatever a thing is in
itself, it would still be that thing, one must suppose,
whatever became of other things. Therefore my
paper would still be square, though all other things
in the world were to be annihilated, and the space
in which these things were. Yet what would this
mean ? What would be the meaning of a square foot
of space apart from the relation of that square foot
to the surrounding space ? Or what would the size
of my paper mean if there were no things and no
space outside it ? Or (to confine ourselves to the
" thing " itself), the squareness of the thing belongs
to the thing itself, it will be urged, not to its relation
to other things. But then this " thing " to which I
attribute the property of occupying space is made up
of parts, and apart from the relation of these parts to
each other, what would be the meaning of its being
six inches square ? " Yes," it may be replied, " it is
true that a composite whole like a piece of paper
is made up of parts ; such a thing is no doubt made
what it is by the relations between its parts, but it is
the parts that really exist in themselves." " How
small a part ? " I ask. And then, if the objector
knows something of chemistry, he will perhaps tell
us that the atom of some chemical element is the
real " thing in itself," or some smaller particle, which
(according to speculative modern chemistry) goes to
the making of the chemical element. That would
still be what it is apart from all relation to other
things. And the atom occupies space ? " Certain-
ly." Well, then, if it occupies space, it must have a
top and a bottom, a right and a left. Still the being
of the space-occupying atom is found to be made up

22

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

of relations. We never get rid of the essential
relativity of this " solidity," which of all its qualities
most decidedly seems to belong to the thing itself.
Everywhere we encounter nothing but relations,
until we get down to the point without parts and
without magnitude, and that surely is not a some-
thing which can be conceived of as existing apart
from its relations to other points, nor can that which
has no magnitude be regarded as a " thing." The
very quality then which is most especially supposed
to belong to the individual thing as it is in itself
turns out to be infected through and through with
relativity ; this property at least seems to belong
not to the thing, but to be made up of relations
between things. And is a relation anything apart
from the mind which conceives the relation, which
holds together the two related terms and apprehends
the relation between them ? If not, and if space be
made up of relations, then space must be " sub-
jective " hi the sense of being made by mind, of
having existence only relatively to the apprehending
subject or mind. And the subjectivity of space
carries with it the subjectivity of everything in
space.

" Yes, but you can't have relations apart from
something to relate ; the relation of the things may
only exist for the mind that puts them together, but
there must be something there to be related." Not
' there," I must reply, for we have admitted that
the thereness of the thing was part of its relatedness
meaningless apart from its relation to other things
or points in space. What is the solidity of a thing
apart from the relation between its parts and its
relations to other things ? " Well," it may be
replied, " it resists you when you press it ; it is
something that you can touch, that hurts you when
you stumble upon it, and so on." Yes, but here we
are back again at feelings which it was admitted
could not be apart from some subject which feels.

23

GOD AND MAN

Feelings and relations * are all that we can find in
"things, however long we think about them. We
may no doubt think about a thing which we have
never touched or seen, or had any kind of sensible
experience of, but that merely means that we know
what it would be found to be like if we or some other
mind were to come into such contact with it.
Berkeley was no doubt wrong in failing to dis-
tinguish adequately between an " idea " in the sense
of the present image or sensation and an " idea " in
the sense of some quality which can be thought of
when the feeling is gone ; but then after all the
quality we think of is only a thought of what the
feeling would be like if we did experience it. 2 If
nobody ever did experience or ever could experience
any one particular sensation which is called green,
the judgment " trees are green " would be false or
meaningless. Feelings actual or possible feelings
actually experienced or idealised by thought, and
relations between such actual or idealised feelings
besides these there is nothing in " things." If any-
one still insists that this is not all, let him tell us
what more he wants in his " things." If he cannot
tell us of any property that belongs to the things
whose self-existence he so passionately asserts, the
assertion must surely be meaningless. If it means
anything to him, he can surely tell us what it is :
and when he tells us something about things that
cannot be easily shown to be either a feeling or a

1 1 fully recognise that pure feeling, feeling without relation, is a mere
abstraction, as much so as relation without something to relate.

2 It is perfectly true that our thought of a quality is an abstract universal
which is never actually the same as, and never perfectly reproduces what I
or anyone else has ever experienced in actual present perception, but still
it is an attempt to reproduce it. What we experience is never merely
blue in general, but the judgment that the thing has such and such a
quality is only true because and in so far as the thing actually produces the
feeling which we struggle to reproduce in thought. The metaphysicians
who have insisted on this point with most penetration never seem ade-
quately to grapple with the question, " What is there really in common
between the actual perception and the universal idealised content " ?
what in short a " content " really is. But such questions need not be
answered for our present purpose.

24

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

quality meaningless apart from what is actually felt,
or a relation, his assertion will have a meaning and
may be discussed. Till then, we shall assume that
-everything we know, everything we can intelligibly
assert to exist must be either a feeling or feelable
quality or a relation or some combination of the two.
Feelings cannot exist apart from a feeling conscious-
ness, relations can only exist for a relating intelli-
gence. The " esse " of things is for mind. But of
course the things thought or felt cannot exist apart
irom the mind which thinks and feels. I cannot
stay to dwell upon either the really difficult prob-
lems, or the fanciful and over-subtle ones, which
may be raised as to the " reality " of the mind or
self. It will be enough to assume that in a sense
sufficient for every purpose of the following argu-
ment, those who have accepted the contention that
there are no things apart from mind will be prepared
to admit the existence of the mind itself. We must
not, of course, take the mind out of all relation to the
objects of its thought. It may reasonably enough
be contended that mind apart from thing, " subject "
apart from " object," is as unintelligible as matter or
thing apart from mind. But when we are clear that
by " object " or " thing " we only mean that which
the mind thinks or feels, and that no independence
or self-existence can be attributed to the thing, the
distinction between " mind " and " thing " becomes
merely a distinction within the mind. The mind
undoubtedly does distinguish itself from the things
which it thinks, but that does not show that the
things which it thinks have any existence apart from
the thought which thinks them or from some other
spirit's thought. I am not my toothache, and yet
nobody thinks that my toothache has any existence
apart from me. " The mind " the subject, to
speak in more technical language has no existence
apart from some object or other, but that object
may be in ultimate analysis simply a state or

25

GOD AND MAN

experience of the subject or of some other subject.

And this last point brings me to an objection which
will probably be occurring to the reader. " Do you
really mean," I may be asked, " that the world is as
much merely a state of mind as my toothache ? Are
you not breaking down all distinction between
subjective and objective, between fancy and fact,
between reality and delusion ? " A complete and
adequate answer to this question would involve a
system of Philosophy, and as a basis for it a system
of Logic. But within the limits now at my disposal
an answer may be suggested under three heads.

(a) There is always a difference between the idea
in my head and an objective fact. Even when I
confine myself to my own sensations, there is a
difference between the sensation considered simply
as such and the judgment that I have a sensation.
The feeling the toothache, it may be is purely
mine, and nobody else's. It exists only while it is
felt ; it did not exist yesterday, and will not exist
to-morrow. But the judgment that I have a tooth-
ache is a statement of objective truth. That is true
for me, and it is true for all the world. Anyone who,
though he feels nothing of my toothache, judges or
thinks that I have not got a toothache is in error.
No wishes, no thinking away of that toothache on
my part or anyone else's part will cause it to be any
the less a fact ; it is part of the truth about things ;
anyone who does not know that that toothache has
been felt does not know all that there is to know.
And the fact that I should have a toothache to-day
always was true, and the fact that I have had
toothache will always remain true, long after my
aches have ceased and my tooth has mingled with
the dust. My toothache, in short, is subjective ; the
fact that I have a toothache is objective. There
would still be a difference between subjective and
objective, though I were the only consciousness in
the universe. My perceptions as such are subjective,

26

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

but the fact that I have them, and the laws which
determine the conditions under which I shall have
such and such a perception, are objective.

(&) On the basis of this distinction it becomes plain
that, even supposing I were the only consciousness
in the universe, there would still be a distinction
between fact and fancy, between an idea in my head
and an objective fact. I may have an idea that I
shall have no toothache, but that idea if by idea
is meant a piece of knowledge as knowledge is false,
as I discover to my cost when to-morrow comes, and
with it the toothache. Of course, considered as an
" idea in my head," as a piece of experience, as a
" psychological event," that idea of mine has a reality
of its own, but it is not the same reality as the
toothache. What I judge is false ; the fact that I
judge is as much a fact as toothache. My delusions
and my toothache are both of them realities in their
way, but they are different realities. Hence, even
supposing there were no other consciousness in the
universe than his own, there would be a very real
and important distinction between the snakes that a
man merely imagines in a fit of delirium tremens and
an anguis in herba. The snakes that people his
disordered imagination do not bite ; the snakes that
waylay his path in Africa do. The chimsera has an
existence of its own in the world of art and literature
and primitive imagination ; and that world is a part
of the whole world of reality, but it has a' very
different place from that occupied by lions and
tigers. 1

(c) So far I have assumed my consciousness to be
the only one in the universe. I will not now go into
the question of the intellectual process by which we
come to believe that there are other minds than ours
in the world. I assume that in some way we have
become aware of that fact. And when we are aware

1 Of course I here treat snakes and lions simply as objects of experience,,
apart altogether from, their consciousness.

27

GOD AND MAN

of that fact, the most simple and obvious distinction
between fact and fancy, imagination and reality,
between subjective and objective, comes to this : we
call " subjective " that which I only perceive,
" objective " that which (under certain conditions)
others will perceive also. Thought always deals (i.e.
true thought does deal, and all thought purports to
deal) with objective truths ; but then, it is all-
important to remember, truths are not realities.
They would not be true unless somebody at some
time or other actually experienced or felt something.
Thus in its way my toothache is an objective fact.
.But we call it subjective because it is only I that
feel it. Equally so with the snake seen in delirium
iremens ; that snake is a very formidable reality to
the delirious person. But he is in error only when
he supposes that his snake has an " objective
xeality," when he thinks that other people see what
he sees, or when he supposes that what can be seen
oy him can also be touched or eaten by himself or
others.

(d) One more point may be necessary, and this
must be merely glanced at, though in a metaphysical
treatise it would occupy much ground. The common
distinction between subjective and objective, be-
tween my private experience and the world of
things, turns partly upon the fact that the world of
things occupies space ; my subjective experiences do
not. No doubt my physical pains are localised
probably even the most spiritual of my emotions ;
but they are not " things," partly because the
experience which I have at that point of space is one
which others cannot have there, partly because the
feeling is not the feeling of touch and of resisted
pressure which is implied by the true object or thing.
And, though the presence of an object in space means
ultimately that I and others do and will continue to
have experiences of touch at a certain point of space,
the notion of space itself is not a feeling. Space is

28

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

the creation of thought ; the idea of a permanent
object " occupying " space, consisting of parts
existing side by side simultaneously, cannot be
resolved into any series of merely subjective feelings-
succeeding one another in my or anybody else's,
mind. The idea of space and the correlative con-
ception of extended substance is a creation of
thought, and has the " objectivity " belonging to
thought. The world of things in space therefore
unlike my pleasures, pains, and emotions is a world
which is the same for all ; but still it exists for mind
and not outside mind, and it would not be real at all
if that which we think did not reveal itself in actual
experience under certain conditions to some actually
feeling conscience. The back of the moon is real,
though nobody (it may be) has seen it or climbed its
mountains, because it exists for thought now ; but
that thought would be shown not to be a thought
of reality, a true thought, if somebody got round
to the back of it and failed to experience the
sensations of touch and sight which we believe he
would experience.

The attempt to distinguish between thought and.
reality has brought us to a difficulty. We have been
compelled to admit the reality of the things which
no eye of man has seen and no hand has touched,
because under certain circumstances they would be-
seen or thought ; if that be so, they exist only when
they are actually thought of. But, it may be said,
does not this make Science a delusion ? Geology tells-
us that the earth was once a mass of molten matter,,
and before that of gaseous matter. When no mind
of man or animal was in existence to feel that
intolerable heat, or even to think of it, in what
consisted the reality of that world which science
reveals to us ? Can it be said that it was a real world
then because we infer its existence now ? Does the
world of the past begin to exist when its past exist-
ence first dawned upon the mind of an eighteenth-

20;.

GOD AND MAN

-century geologist ? What of all the undiscovered
facts about the universe, of all the truth which is
waiting to be discovered, but is not yet discovered ?
Does that existence consist in a perpetual potenti-
ality ? Can a potentiality exist by itself ? According
to the view we have hitherto taken, the world was
once, in a sense, all potentiality ! What is meant by
potential existence ? A thing which is one thing
actually may be potentially something else, i.e. it
will turn into something else under certain condi-
tions. The egg is potentially a chicken, but can
there be such a thing as a potential chicken which is
yet actually nothing ! What sort of existence is
this an existence which is not anything, but might
be something under certain circumstances ? Have
we not affirmed the existence of something which we
admit to be a nonentity ? And then if the world
-was once nothing except potentially, how can it ever
have become an actuality ? Can that which is not
produce, give birth to, cause that which is ? Can
the ground or cause of the existent be found in the
non-existent, of the real in the unreal ? These
questions surely need only to be propounded to be
answered in the negative. If we have seen reason
to believe that nothing really exists except mind and
that which exists for mind, it is clearly not our minds
that have always existed ; it is clearly not the case that
what you or I know and feel has reality, while
that of which we have no sort of knowledge or
experience has none. If therefore that which is not
experienced or even thought of by any human con-
sciousness is to have any existence at all, there must
be a Mind for which all things exist always : we
must say that the fiery mass of the pre-animal solar
system existed always in a universal Mind, and that
in his Mind there exists to-day whatever stars the
astronomer's telescope has not yet sighted. Such a
Universal Mind it is that we mean when we speak of
God.

30

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

The existence of God is thus shown to be an
absolute necessity of thought. It is not " proved "
in 'the sense of being demonstrated in the way that
one particular truth of science can be demonstrated
as logically flowing from some other particular truth.
Nor does it appear to me at least that the existence
of God is self-evident in the sense in which the
axioms of mathematics are self-evident. But it is a
belief which is necessary to explain our experience.
It is found on reflection to be necessarily implied or
involved in all our experience.

We cannot understand the world of which we form
a part except upon this assumption of a Universal
Mind, for which, or in which, all that is exists. Such
is the line of thought which presents itself to some of
us as the one absolutely convincing and logically
irrefragable argument for establishing the existence
of God. And yet I know that so strange are these
metaphysical conceptions until one has become
familiarised with them by slow habituation, that
very acute minds may wholly fail to make the
admission on which all turns that " things " can
only exist for mind. Are we to admit that no one
can rationally believe in the existence of God until
he can be brought to make this admission ? Far
from it. It is highly probable that some of my
readers who may fail to accept the metaphysical
theory known as Idealism, who may fail to be con-
vinced that things exist only for mind, may yet be
led by the -argument we have gone through to reflect
how great is the assumption that matter can exist
without mind, and they may find in this line of
thought some reinforcement of the common-sense
conviction that mind cannot ultimately be simply
the product of blind, unthinking matter that how-
ever real or self-existent matter may be when once
in existence, it cannot have existed entirely by itself,
and must have originally owed its existence and the
orderly laws by which it is governed to mind. The

GOD AND MAN

metaphysical argument is after all only a fuller and
more explicit development of what is implied in the
commonplace conviction of the mass of men that
the world must have had a Creator, and of others,
who, though they may find difficulties in the idea of
an absolute beginning of matter, cannot conceive
of matter except as perpetually dominated and
controlled by mind. Such persons may find
their conviction strengthened by the following:
considerations.

Let us return to the main thread of our argument.
All things must exist for God, must be eternally
present in the mind of God. But what do we mean
by " present " ? What do we mean by the thought
of God ? It is best frankly to confess at once that we
do not know. It is common with writers of the
Hegelian School (or rather with that right wing of
the Hegelian School which really believes in the
existence of a divine Consciousness, and not in a
mere deity of abstract " categories " J ) to assume that
the knowledge of God is simply the same as our
knowledge of things when we think of them apart
from present perception, except that our knowledge
is in part while God's knowledge is of the whole.
They never seem to realise how absolutely a reference
to actual perception is implied in all our knowledge.
I can think of the greenness of the tree, but that
word " green " would mean nothing to me apart
from what I have once seen. I may generalise the
idea of green, and make abstraction of much that
was actually contained in each particular perception.
What I saw was either light green or dark green :
what I think is simply green. My idea of green in
general excludes the difference between light green
and dark green ; if so, it is of course an idea of
something which I could not possibly see, for the

1 The Hegelian tendency to mistake the abstract form or categories of
self-consciousness, firstly for the self and then for God or Reality as a
whole, has been powerfully criticised by Mr. Herbert Bradley, and by Prof*.
Pringle-Pattison (Seth) in his Hegelianism and Personality.

32

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

seen green must be either light or dark or medium.
Or you may say that (if I know all about green) my
idea of green would include all these alternatives ;
it is the idea of a colour which may be light or dark
or medium, and which must be one of them. But
still it is meaningless apart from what I have actually-
experienced ; and, when I think of it, the notion is
meaningless, apart from what I or some other being
might experience. And experiences which I have
not had I can only think of by some more or less
vague analogy to what I have experienced. I can
suppose a pain intenser than I have ever felt, but
such conceptions mean to me very little indeed,
though the knowledge may be quite enough to guide
action. It is the same even with those elements of
our experience which we are right in referring not to-
sense, but to thought. My idea of space in general,
or of a triangle in general, is not derived from mere
sense, but it presupposes sensible experience, and is.
meaningless apart from it. I may think of a triangle
in general which is not either a large triangle or a
small one, but such thoughts are abstractions, not
realities. Triangularity is simply the name for the
shape, alike in all, of the triangular things which I
have seen or felt, or might feel and think. The shape
is not real apart from the things which have that
shape, and the things are perceivable only by sensa-
tion. Everywhere the reality of the objects which
we know has more or less immediate reference to the
facts of perception. And therefore it is meaningless
to ascribe a knowledge of the various thoughts of
qualities which in us are derived from present per-
ceptions to a consciousness which never has had, or
will have, those perceptions. We may conceive
obscurely God as knowing what things look like to
us who see, though He sees not. But that does not
remove the difficulty as to how a consciousness which
does not feel can know what it is to feel. I offer
no solution of the difficulty ; I only protest that the

c 33-

GOD AN D MAN

idea of a purely thinking consciousness conveys no
intelligible meaning to us. We can only think of the
divine Consciousness by the analogy of our own.
Such conceptions must necessarily be inadequate,
but we do not make them less inadequate by attribut-
ing to God only the more abstract elements in our
thoughts and eliminating altogether the actual
experiences which give our thoughts all their mean-
ing. It may be that the divine Consciousness is less
-unlike our thinking activity than it is unlike our
present perceptions. It may be that the difference
"between actual present perceptions and the thought
of what may be perceived does not exist at all in
God ; certainly we cannot suppose that the difference
for God can be the same as it is for us, if only because
present perception is with us localised in a bodily
organ. We can only say that the same line of
thought which leads us to believe that the world
which we know fragmentarily with a knowledge
that comes and goes, and always has its origin and
starting-point in present perception or feeling does
exist somehow in the Consciousness of God, involves
also the inference that in God's Consciousness there
must be feeling also as well as thought, or something
analogous to feeling as well as something analogous
to thought.

At this point it will be well to stop and take
account of the conclusions to which we have been so
far led. We have tried to make it plain that the
existence of God is a necessity of thought. But what,
from our present point of view, does " God " mean.
So far it merely means a Spirit who knows, and in
some sense experiences, all reality. The present
argument leads us up to the idea of a Spirit who
knows all that is real, without whom nothing that is
known could exist except, indeed, the spirits or
selves whose relation to the divine we have not as
yet examined. A divine mind, but not a divine will.
For all that appears so far, we might remain with the

34

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

conclusion that God's relation to the world is the
same as ours, except that our knowledge is only in
part. We might say that the divine Mind makes
nature, but only in the sense in which human minds
make nature. There is nothing in this argument to
suggest that God is the cause of Nature, that the
events of the world's history are guided by his will,
-or fulfil his purposes. And here some Idealists stop.
How impotent and valueless for any practical pur-
pose such a Theism is apt to be, if we do not subtly
import into it religious ideas and associations which
really come from another source, I need hardly stay
io point out. For aught that appears to the con-
trary, this Idealist Deity might well be thought of as
good, and yet the world to which by some unintel-
ligible but inevitable necessity He finds himself
linked be very bad, and going from bad to worse.
And what after all can we mean by calh'ng a will-less
deity " good " ? What possible grounds of hope or
of aspiration can there be in such an idea ? What
emotion could he inspire, what worship could he
merit ? Such a deity, occupying the position of
otium cum dignitate ascribed to the gods of Epicurus,
^would be as little worshipful as a category or an
Equator. The argument by itself can prove little
that is of value for religion or for morality : but it
forms nevertheless the necessary starting-point for
a. Theism which may be worth more. If we are to
-carry on the argument, we must start afresh, and
iace the problem of Causation.

III. THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSALITY

When we were asking the plain man to say what
he meant by the " thing " which he insisted must be
ihere whether he felt it or not, there was one element
in his consciousness to which we did not do justice.
At bottom his refusal to be satisfied with any
^explanation of the thing that treated it only as a

35

GOD AND MAN

state or phase of his own consciousness, lay in his
conviction that the cause or source of the feelings
which he experienced did not lie in himself. Of
some of his experiences he does find the cause in
himself. He is conscious of being the cause of his
own actions, that is to say, he is conscious of deter-
mining his own volitions, 1 and within certain limits
(determined by physical facts not under his own
control) he finds that these volitions produce effects
in the world of his experience. He wills to eat, and
(if his organism be in a healthy state and the food
within his reach) the eating, follows. But where no<
such volition has been exercised, the experiences that
happen to him are not, he feels, caused by himself ;
many of them are unforeseen, many of them are-
unwelcome. He does not cause them : yet his.
reason tells him that they must have a cause. No*
doubt when he insists that the cause of his experience
must lie there, outside himself, in the space which is-
occupied by the perceived object, he is forgetting-
that this very space is part of the experience for
which he seeks an explanation. The fact that the
impact of one thing upon another in space is followed
by changes in that other thing makes it seem natural
to explain the appearance of a phenomenon in his
experience as due to the impact of an external thing
upon his mind. But things are outside one another ;
they are not outside the mind : the mind is not an
object in space. Hence he has no right to say that
the cause of my perceiving a tree must lie outside my
physical organism, and in the tree. The space-
occupyingness of the tree is as much part of the
phaenomenon of which I want the explanation as any-
other quality in the object as perceived or thought
of by me. But a cause for my there and then seeing
and touching the tree there must be. It is a.

1 Nothing that follows necessarily involves what is commonly called the
Freewill or Indeterminist theory. The argument is satisfied if we accept
the fact of " Self-determination " in that sense which is quite compatible?
with a non-materialistic Determinism.

36

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

necessity of thought to suppose that nothing which
has a beginning can be without a cause why it should
begin to be.

Primitive man was disposed to account for all the
changes of nature, or at least for any change involving
motion not obviously accounted for by external
impact, as due to spiritual beings like himself. He
was conscious of being a cause : his reason demanded
a cause other than himself for movement which he
did not cause : he naturally inferred that the cause
of phaenomena must be found in the same sort of
cause outside him.

With the progress of knowledge, however, men
came to observe a certain regular order and succession
in their involuntary experiences. One region of
nature after another was removed from the domain
of those things of which there seemed to be no other
explanation than the passions or caprices of indivi-
duals like himself, and was reduced to the sphere of
xegular law or uniformity. The observed uniformity
of nature involved changes in men's ideas about
nature : (i) The discovery that all changes in nature
are interconnected and interdependent, that the
world is a whole, all the parts of which are mutually
interdependent, made it impossible to explain it as
the result of independent, jarring, and mutually
hostile wills. If the universe was to be referred to
minds, science made it evident that it must be
referred to a single mind. (2) The idea of caprice,
irregularity, unaccountability which clave to the
older form of anthropomorphism, was replaced by
the idea of order, plan, design. If nature was
referred to a mind, it was a rational mind : it was in
man's reason rather than in his desires and caprices
that men came to find whatever analogy they still
assumed between man and the universal cause. The
same growing knowledge which destroyed the idea
of a multitude of jarring personalities substituted the
idea of a single rational plan for the conception of

37

GOD AND MAN

many inconsistent, mutable caprices. The purposes
of nature, for those to whom nature still seemed to
imply a purpose, became one purpose.

For many minds the observed regularity of nature,
carrying with it the power of prediction and the
power of limited control over nature, has come to be
so intimately associated with the idea of Causality
that it has substituted itself for that idea itself. The
phenomenal conditions under which an observed
phenomenon is found to occur are commonly spoken
of as the cause of that phenomenon. Some have
even brought themselves to believe that it is self-
evident that nature must be uniform ; to such
persons the idea of interference with the observed
course of nature by a spiritual agency, finite or
infinite, seems not only gratuitous and contrary to
experience, but an a priori absurdity or unthink-
ability, like the idea of two straight lines enclosing a
space. Of course, the fact that nature is observed
to be uniform supplies a strong presumption that the
ultimate cause of nature does work uniformly ;
probable arguments are always based upon partial
knowledge. All the knowledge we have of the Cause
goes to show that that Cause is uniform in its
working : hence the probability that it will always
be found to work uniformly is enormously more
probable than the contrary supposition. But I
certainly find no difficulty in thinking that A might
follow B a hundred tunes, and not follow it the
hundred and first time. Mere succession is not
causation. A succession which does not explain
itself when it happens once is not any more intel-
ligible when it happens a hundred times. The actual
uniformity of nature is as much in need of explana-
tion as a conceivable irregularity. The uniformity
of nature (in Lotze's language) is a necessary postu-
late of all scientific reasoning ; it is no necessity of
thought.

The idea of uniform succession among phenomena

38

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

does not satisfy my idea of Causality. What would
satisfy it ? We observed before that there is one kind
of causality of which we are immediately conscious,
i.e. the causality of our own wills. It is sometimes
said that the idea of causality is got from our own
experience of volition : and to this mode of statement
it is rightly objected that no experience of succession
could put the idea of Causality into a mind which
lacked the concept. A mere observation of mental
determination followed by an observed motion of
limbs could never transform the idea of succession
into the idea of Causality. 1 The idea of Causality is,
indeed, an a priori category of thought. We are by-
nature capable of asking the question " Why ? "
No experience could make us believe that something
happened without some reason why it should happen.
What, then, is implied in this idea of Causality ? It
seems to involve two elements : (i) the idea of force
or power ; (2) the idea of final cause. If the idea of
power be objected to as vague, it is impossible ta
give a definition or explanation of an ultimate idea :
but perhaps for some minds it may seem a preferable
mode of statement if I say that the ground or
explanation of anything that happens must be found
in something which already exists. Events must
have their ground in reality. " Ex nihilo nihil fit.'"
We cannot believe that something should suddenly
appear if nothing existed before ; or that something
should appear which has no connexion with what was
in existence already. To put the matter in yet
another way, we necessarily believe that the present
state of a thing is connected with its past states : the
explanation of the present must be found in the past,

1 This is only an objection to the attempt to get the idea of " Causality "
out of " experience " understood in the sense of the Sensationalistic
Empiricist. The position that we are immediately conscious of exercising
activity seems to be practically indistinguishable from the position that the
idea of Causality is logically a priori, but that we become aware of it only
in our consciousness of volition. For a psychological defence of the view
here assumed that we are conscious of exercising activity the reader
may be referred to Dr. Stout's Analytical Psychology, especially Book II,
chap. i.

39

GOD AND MAN

-or rather in something which persists through past
and present. But that is not the whole of the
explanation. If I am told that A is A because it
was B, I still may ask why ? Why did A become B ?
and my curiosity is not satisfied until I know the
purpose for which A became B. If I find my fur-
niture disturbed during my absence, I ask " why "
did this happen. When I discover that X did it, I
am partially satisfied, but I still press the question
" Why ? " And when I am told that X did it by
way of a joke, and that X is a kind of being to whom
such a joke appears a good or rational end of action,
then I am satisfied : then the occurrence is explained.
It is this union of power with purpose which satisfies
my idea of Causality. And such a union can only be
found in a consciousness ; it is only in consciousness,
so far as we know or can conceive, that a final cause
can become an efficient cause, that power and end
can meet, that the idea which is found good can pass
into an actuality. The idea of Cause is derived from
our volition in the sense that all our ideas or concepts
are derived from our experience ; and it is in all
probability, as a matter of psychological fact, a
concept which we should not have unless we were
wnling as well as thinking intelligences. At all
events in our experience of volition, and in that
experience alone, we are conscious of actually
exercising Causality. There alone we find a content
for the bare abstract notion of " Cause." The idea
of Cause and the idea of Will mutually imply one
another. The argument which leads us to look upon
God as willing the world's history as well as thinking
it may now be exhibited in three stages

(i) We have the a priori conviction as clear and
as strong as our a priori conviction that two and two
make four and cannot make six that events cannot
happen without a cause, and this idea of Causality
implies such a union of power and final Cause as is
only found in, and is only intelligible in, a purposeful

40

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

or a causative intelligence, i.e. a Will. This fact by
itself, even apart from other metaphysical pre-
suppositions, supplies a strong argument that the
ultimate Reality the ground or source or cause of
all that happens must be a Rational Will.

(2) A quite different line of argument has already
led us up to the conviction that the idea of matter
without mind is unintelligible, and that the world
must be thought of as perpetually existing in and for
a universal Mind or Thought. Our analysis of
Causality now leads us to think of this Mind as not
only thinking, but as causing the objects of his own
thought ; as Will as well as Thought. For, we have
seen, mind is the only thing that can really be a cause
at all.

(3) If once we have reason to believe that the
ultimate reality is spiritual, analogy would lead us
(even apart from the Causality argument) to compare
it to mind as we know it. We know nothing what-
ever of thought without will. We can form no idea
of such a thing. It is as much an abstraction as
colour without surface or sensation apart from time.
In all our thinking there is attention, and attention
is an act of will. In every waking moment of ours
we are thinking, willing, feeling. If therefore on any
ground we are led to find the origin of things in a
thinking Mind, it is reasonable to infer that that
Mind is Will as well as Thought.

It may of course be freely admitted that many
characteristics of " willing/' as it appears in us,
cannot possibly be attributed to God. People some-
times, no doubt, mistake the mere sense of effort,
which is largely a matter of muscular contraction,
or the choice between alternatives of which even the
rejected one is felt to be attractive, for the essence
of volition. The essence of volition, for our present
purpose, is the conscious origination of changes.
However much we insist that human attributes
must be applied to God sensu eminentiori, there is

4*

GODANDMAN

every reason for saying that the concept of will, in.
this sense, must be an essential element of the best
conception which we can form of God. To refuse to-
include this idea in our conception of God is to refuse
to think about Him at all ; for the idea of thought
without will has simply no meaning whatever for us.
The fact that God wills does not, it must be admitted,,
actually prove what He wills, but it will hardly be
seriously disputed that if a Universal Thinker be
conceived of as willing at all, he must be conceived
of as willing all the objects of his thought, i.e. the
world.

If the position at which we have arrived be
accepted, it will almost inevitably carry with it
what is, or at least what ought to be, meant by the
Personality of God. There are, no doubt, thinkers
who will accept the foregoing argument so far as it
tends to establish the " self-consciousness " of God,,
but will hesitate to attribute to Him personality,,
because personality seems to carry with it the
limitations of human personality. If all that is-
meant by such scruples is that God cannot be thought
of as subject to the same sort of limitations of power
and knowledge as human persons, the objection
might be met by saying that God must be thought of
as super-personal Indeed, we may say (with Lotze)
that the ideal of personality is one which is never
fully attained by the human consciousness, and that
God is the only being who is in the fullest and com-
pletest sense a Person. But the objection to the
term person is very likely to spring from an unwilling-
ness to admit any distinction between God and the
world. We must therefore say a word as to the
relation which the view we have taken contemplates
as existing between God and (i) the material world
or things, (ii) other spirits.

42

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

IV. GOD AND THE WORLD

(i) God's relation to things. It has been contended
that the world must be thought of as perpetually-
existing in some sense in the mind of God. So much
is common ground for all genuine Idealists. And it
may be admitted that the idea of a subject without
an object is an impossible one. In that sense we
may say with the late Professor T. H. Green; that
" the world is as necessary to God as God is to the
world " ; and in that sense we may, if we please,
think of the world as included in the very being of
God. By many of the Schoolmen the world as
existing in the mind of God was identified with the
Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. But
the expression, " the world is necessary to God,"
seems to suggest that the world is as independent of
God as the objects of our thought are independent of
our will. It pictures God as perpetually annexed by
some unintelligible fate to a world quite alien to his-
own inner nature as to some Siamese twin from whom
He would perchance, but cannot, part. It may even
be contended that such a view really exaggerates the
distinctness of God from the world, and fails to
adhere to that Monism, that tendency to reduce the
world to a single principle, in the interest of which it
is conceived. The only sense in which Theism is.
concerned to establish such a distinctness is the
sense that this world is what it is by reason of the
will of God ; so much seems implied in the Hegelian
formula that God must be thought of as a being who.
creates the objects of his own thought if only the
term " create " be taken seriously enough. Once
admit the idea of Will into our conception of God,
and there is an end to all danger of any pantheistic
identification between God and the world.

(ii) The relation between God and other Spirits.
Whatever may be thought as to the relation of God
to time, other spirits at all events have a beginning

4S

GOD AND MAN

in time, and the fact of that beginning must have a
cause. 1 Now we know that the appearance of con-
scious life in the world is dependent upon certain
material conditions : every stage in the development
of such life is conditioned by the development of
certain bodily organisms. When once, therefore, it
is admitted that the bodily organisms (like other
material things) must be thought of as caused by the
Will of God, the admission will carry with it the
further proposition that the beginning-to-be of the
spirits themselves is also due to that Will. And if we
once admit a causative relation between the supreme
Spirit and the other spirits, we shall avoid all identi-
fication between the spirits and God. No doubt
there is a resemblance, an identity of nature between
God and all other spiritual existence, especially in the
higher stages of its development, such as we do not
feel to exist between God and any mere object of
thought. There is therefore no objection to saying
that a human soul is a " spark " or " emanation of
the divine," or a " limited mode of the divine self-
consciousness," or that " human thought is due to
the partial communication to the human soul of the
divine thought." Such formulae are indeed of great
value, inasmuch as they assert that there is a real
community of nature between the human soul and
the divine, and that our knowledge, though im-
perfect, is real knowledge, real knowledge of the
world as it is and as it appears to God, not some mere
unreal phantasmagoria arbitrarily devised to amuse
us with an unreal appearance of knowledge, as it has
been represented to be by some philosophies. But
such expressions must not be used to disguise either
the causal dependence of the human soul upon the
divine will or the distinctness of God from such
souls when once they have appeared. And after all
such phrases can hardly be regarded as any great

1 Since Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality the position that the
individual self is timeless has ceased to be necessary to philosophic ortho-
doxy.

44

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

improvement upon the old biblical statement that:
God " created man in his own image and in his own
likeness." And the very gist of this likeness is that
every human soul exists " for itself," instead of
being (like any mere thing) only the object of an-
other's thought. To speak of a spirit which is for
itself as being included in or being part of another or
identical with another spirit is to deny all that is
meant by the assertion that it is a self or a spirit.
And if it be admitted that the human spirit has an
existence of its own, not identical with the divine,,
the admission should remove any lingering scruples
about the ascription of Personality to God. It may
indeed be admitted that God knows all that goes on
in our minds in a way which we do not know the
thoughts of other minds, that He in some way
overcomes that " impenetrability " which is some-
times supposed to be an essential characteristic of
Personality ; but that does not amount to the really
meaningless assertion that God's existence " in-
cludes " the existence of these finite spirits. Such
an assertion may have a meaning in the mouths of
those to whom God is simply a name for the totality
of limited self-consciousnesses together with the
world which they know ; but it is unintelligible in the
mouth of anyone who really believes in God as a
self-consciousness which is not merely those finite
spirits. God may think or feel all that we think or
feel ; but if He does so, then over and above that
feeling or thinking of his, there will remain the
thinking or feeling which I call myself. Two spirits
thinking or feeling alike will be for ever two and -not
one. These remarks are not made with any desire to-
detract from the intimacy of the communion which
we may suppose to exist between the divine mind
and the human ; but communion implies the exist-
ence of two spirits, and is destroyed when the union
between them passes into identity. To speak of the
human heart craving for such a union with God as to-

45-

GOD AND MAN

-destroy personal distinctness is perhaps a natural
exaggeration of religious poetry or religious rhetoric,
"but when it is adopted as a statement of literal fact,
Philosophy breaks down the barrier which separates
^ober thinking from pure Mysticism.

To some minds the admission that God is not the
human soul of which nevertheless He is the cause
may seem to carry with it the position that God is
" limited " or " finite." In that sense of the word
" limited " in which the being of anything is said to
be limited by being distinct from something else, by
not being that other thing, in that sense I should
most certainly admit that God is finite inasmuch as
He is not man. The Infinite in the sense of some
philosophers means simply that which admits of no
negative predicate, which is everything and of which
we cannot say that there is anything that is not it.
But the words " limited " or " finite " in the language
of theology or religion usually carry with them the
sense of imperfection or disparagement. God is not
limited by his creatures if by that is meant that He
is constrained, confined, impeded by something out-
side Himself, since the appearance and the continued
existence of these spirits is due to his will : they
spring from his own being. We may, if we like, say
that they are still within Him inasmuch as they are
still the object of his thought, or that their thoughts
are fully known to Him ; but such language is
unnatural and misleading, inasmuch as it almost
inevitably suggests the idea either that God is no
more than they or that each finite spirit is merely a
part of, an effluence from, a fleeting and unsubstan-
tial phase of God. It is a pity that language which
naturally suggests such pantheistic developments
should often be played with by those who have no
real sympathy with them. Even by speaking of
God as " the Infinite " theologians have often in-
volved themselves in such non-theistic lines of
thought ; but the term may be accepted in the sense

46

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

ihat there is nothing which exists independently of
the will of God : whatever limitation is implied in
the existence of other spirits is a self-limitation, not
an arbitrary self-limitation but one which necessarily
springs from the nature and character of God.

V. THE MORAL CHARACTER OF GOD

So far our conception of God has been based upon
purely metaphysical considerations : we have left
out of account the moral considerations. Cardinal
Newman has declared that for the existence of God
he wants no other argument than the fact of the
existence of Conscience. It is perhaps difficult to
construct an argument for the existence of God
which resolutely makes abstraction of all not purely
ethical considerations. The very idea of Morality
-would, indeed, be unintelligible when taken wholly
apart from the other activities of that single Self, of
ivhich Conscience is but one aspect or manifestation.
But certain it is that the existence of Conscience is
among all the facts of consciousness the one which
most imperiously demands the idea of God for its
explanation. The existence of Conscience supplies
one of the great arguments for supposing that God
exists : it supplies the sole grounds for saying any-
thing about his character or purposes. We have
.already seen that even metaphysical arguments for
his existence owe something to the Practical Reason,
.since the merely intellectual understanding of volition
was found to involve the idea of end or purpose or
final cause ; and we should know nothing about final
causes but for the consciousness of ourselves as
exerting causality with a view to an end which we
desire or pronounce good. 1 The judgment that a
thing is good, or possesses value, is the judgment of

1 1 do not mean that to desire and to pronounce good are the same thing.
All desire, when reflected on, suggests the idea of final cause, but that
demand of Reason for a final cause is only fully satisfied by the desire
which the moral consciousness approves.

47

GOD AND MAN

Practical Reason, or what is popularly called Con-
science.

But now let us confine ourselves to what may be
inferred from the existence of this Practical Reason,
It is undeniable that our moral judgments are in
themselves quite independent of all theological or
metaphysical considerations. When I pronounce
that a certain end is intrinsically good, and that
therefore the action which tends to bring it about is
intrinsically right, my words have a meaning which
is intelligible (if it is not fully intelligible) apart from
all beliefs or disbeliefs as to the ultimate origin, con-
stitution, or destiny of the universe. Such judg-
ments of value may be pronounced, have been
pronounced, are constantly being pronounced, and
acted upon by people who have no positive belief, or
a positive disbelief, in God and a future life. And
good men, in proportion to their goodness, will
certainly continue to act on such judgments, what-
ever becomes of their speculative beliefs. But all the
same it is not difficult to show that that which they
mean cannot be fully justified without the assump-
tion that the ultimate Reality is spiritual. When I
say " this is good " (e.g. this or that person's happi-
ness) I do not mean merely that I happen to like it.
It may be something which can only be attained by
sacrifice or loss on my part : if that is the case, I
feel that I ought to take that step, though it brings
me no pleasure. I do not merely mean that the end
is one which I should like to be realised. For other
people might not like the end or object achieved.
Both statements would be true that I like it and
that X does not like it ; neither of us would be wrong
in his assertion. But that is not what I mean by
saying " it is good." My judgment is " objective."
I mean that if somebody else judges differently, one
or both of us is wrong. This does not imply a claim
to personal infallibility on my part ; quite the con-
trary. The very essence of my conviction is that

48

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

things are right or wrong quite independently of my
judging them to be so, quite independently of my
likings or dislikings. When I say " happiness is
good," or " this particular kind of happiness is
good," I mean that anyone who thinks it not good
makes a mistake, just as much as when he says that
two and two make five. That is what I mean, but,,
of course, I may be wrong. People may make mis-
takes in their moral judgments just as they may
make mistakes in doing a sum of simple arithmetic.
When a man does a sum of addition, and pronounces
that the answer is so and so, he does not merely
mean " I have made the answer so and so," his.
judgment claims to be universally true, true objec-
tively, true for all actual or possible intelligences.
And when he says " this is right," he equally implies
an objective assertion : the essence of his assertion
would be gone if he were to suppose that " right "
meant simply the course of action which happens
to commend itself to him.

Moral truth or falsity then is objective. And yet
we know that as a matter of fact our human moral-
ideas have slowly evolved. We believe that cruelty
to animals is wrong ; yet there was a time when no-
human being saw anything wrong in cruelty to>
animals. And even among educated, civilised,
reputedly moral adults, there are grave differences of
moral judgment. There are degrees of moral insight
just as there are degrees of musical appreciation;
and even between the most sensitive consciences
there are differences of moral ideal, just as there are
some differences of musical taste among the most
musical. Every man in making a moral judgment
claims universality for it ; that is part of his mean-
ing, and yet no one can seriously believe that his
particular moral ideal is an absolutely true one, that
his moral consciousness is the absolutely flawless
mirror of the absolute moral truth. What is morally
good always was morally good and always will be

D 49

GOD AND MAN

so j 1 so much is implied in every moral judgment.
But when and where does this absolute lightness
exist ? What sort of reality has this lightness or
intrinsic goodness ? The same question may be
raised about the laws of physical nature : we saw
that it was impossible to think of those laws as
having their existence merely in our transitory minds
or as properties of a self-existing matter, that the
objectivity even of our ordinary judgments about
matters of fact implied for their justification the
existence of a Universal Mind. But still the Materi-
.alists can plausibly explain the physical laws of
nature as existing in matter. At all events, the
objectivity of those laws, their independence of our
chance thinkings or likings, forces itself upon us in
the most palpable manner. The attempt to " cloy
the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of
a feast," refutes by its palpable failure the attempt
to deny the reality of a physical world independent
of us, whatever metaphysical interpretation we may
put upon this " independent existence." But what
account can we give of this moral " objectivity " ?
Can it be explained on any but a spiritualistic inter-
pretation of the world ? If the ultimate Reality, or
source of Reality, be spiritual if, in short, there be
a God then we can regard his thought and his will,
his ultimate purpose, as the reality of which our
moral judgments are the more or less inadequate
representations. They are true or false in proportion
to their conformity to this standard. On any other
supposition the " objectivity " which our moral
judgments claim remains inexplicable. We might,
of course we should, undoubtedly in proportion to
the strength of our natural desire for the ends which
we pronounce good, continue to guide our own
actions by these judgments. But on reflection we
should be forced to admit that the only objectivity

1 This does not imply that the same concrete actions are always right,
since under different circumstances the true end, in so far as it can be
promoted at all, must be promoted by different means.

50

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

-which we could rationally claim for them would be
their conformity to the judgments of other human
TDeings ; and we should have to admit that at bottom
moral judgments are only the actual ways of thinking
about conduct which de facto prevail among a race
of bipeds who happen to have been evolved during
what Mr. Balfour has called a " brief and transitory
-episode in the life of one of the meanest of the
planets." It is one of the worst practical results of
such an admission that the only objectivity which
moral judgments admit of is their conformity to
public opinion ; and from that there is but a step to
the admission that " to wish to be better than the
"world is to be already on the threshold of immoral-
ity." 1 Those who have given up belief in a moral
Deity can hardly avoid making a god of public
opinion. A robust Agnostic conscience, like that of
Huxley, which defies a " darkening universe," and
opposes his' own moral convictions to those of the
^world, proclaims its profound belief in an objectivity,
which really demands Theism for its explanation.
Our moral judgments claim to be, in so far as they
are true, the law of the universe. They can only be
the law of the universe if (with Plato) we find the
;source of reality and morality in one and the same
" idea of the Good," and an idea can have its abode
only in a Mind.

The idea of Personality which we ascribe to God is
complete when we regard Hun as not only a Reason
and a Will, but as moral, as objectively good. By
this it is not of course meant that his action is
limited by our accepted rules of morality. We
recognise that hi detail our moral rules must be
adapted to our nature as human beings ; many of
them imply the possession of a bodily organism and
relations to other such organisms. What is meant is

1 Bradley, Ethical Studies, p. 180. Of course, if the meaning be merely
that his motive should not be the surpassing of his neighbours, the principle
-would be harmless enough. [In the second edition of the Ethical Studies
s(Oxford, 1927), the passage is on p. 199.]

51

GODANDMAN

that the ideal life for man must be such as commends
itself to the supreme mind that God pursues ends-
which possess absolute value, and that our ends, so-
far as they are the right ends for us, must be in
principle identical with the end or ends which have
value for God. Philosophies which deny all real
distinction between the divine and the human con-
sciousness tend more or less explicitly either to deny
goodness to God, sometimes constructing a picture
of. an " Absolute " who is certainly no fitting object
of worship for men believing Benevolence to be a
virtue, or to deny the validity, not merely of our
moral judgments in detail, but of our whole moral
ideal. They pronounce that acts which in human
beings we should call bad are really good, inasmuch
as (no less than the acts which we call good) they-
tend to bring about the end which, being the end of
the universe, must be thought of as essentially good.
A glance into the history of thought might reveal the-
fact that the immoral tendency of all pantheising
philosophy has not always been merely speculative.
In the political sphere, at all events, the doctrine
that " whatever is, is right," has borne the fruit that
might have been expected of it.

But it may be objected, " How do you, on your
part, reconcile a theory which ascribes the existence
of the world to the volition of a perfectly good
Deity and a Deity whose goodness is, in principle,
the goodness of our human ideals with the existence
of so much undeserved suffering and so much inevit-
able moral evil ? " The discussion of this great
problem would require a separate Essay ; but no-
argument for Theism is likely to have the smallest
weight with those who have ever doubted it, which,
does not, however inadequately, touch upon this, the
fundamental difficulty of Theism. Lotze, 1 the one

1 The Microcosmus is easier-reading than, the Logic and Metaphysic, but is-
a very long work. A sufficient idea of Lotze's attitude towards religious,
questions may be obtained from his short Philosophy of Religion. All thes&
works have been translated into English.

52

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

philosopher of our time who is at once a thinker of
the very highest rank and wholly and unexception-
ably Christian in his thoughts, has confessed that he
not only knows no solution of the problem of evil,
lout that he does not in the least know in what direc-
tion to look for one.

To the first of these statements I should be
prepared heartily to assent ; and if I were compelled
to assent to the second, I should (with Lotze) contend
that no such difficulties can destroy the validity of
the line of arguments, which points to these two
conclusions, " the ultimate source of Reality is a
rational will," and " the ultimate source of Reality
is good." But I do not think we need stop short at
the point at which Lotze does stop. The line of
thought which suggests that God is the cause of all
things, and that He is good, will carry us further.
If God is good, then the ultimate end of the universe
must be good. Anything that appears evil must be
really a means to the good. Following this line of
thought, it is usual with optimistic thinkers to go on
to contend that consequently those means that
appear evil are not really evil at all, that evil is but
the other side of good, etc. and herewith the whole
of the paralysing Pantheism to which I have already
alluded. But to assert that that which my moral
judgment condemns as evil is really very good, is to
condemn myself to utter scepticism. I am just as
certain that pain and sin are not good as I am of the
first principles of reasoning. Compel me to doubt
the first, and I must doubt the second ; and if I
doubt that, I have no longer any reason for affirming
or denying anything at all. The end must justify
the means certainly, but that does not prevent the
means from being bad. A surgical operation is
certainly justified so long as the end cannot be
attained without the means ; but the pain remains
an evil. The same end without that pain would be
still better than the end with that means. No matter

53

GOD AND MAN

what the goodness of the end which is being realised!,
by this universe of ours, the pain and the evil in it
can never become good. A being who is compelled
to attain his ends by the use of means which are bad
must in a sense be regarded as limited. And this
limitation has generally been admitted by reasonable
theologians. Bishop Butler, for instance, admits
that there may be things which are intrinsically as
impossible as for God to change the past. The same
limitation in principle is really implied by the
explanation of evil as the work of a personal devil,,
however groundless such a belief may be, and how-
ever little it really gets rid of the difficulty. It is
perhaps not so much from the theologians as from
the philosophers that objections are likely to come.
Directly we admit that God is limited by the essential
nature of things (it will be urged), we are really
giving up our theistic view of the universe. God
ceases to be the ultimate source of reality ; He
becomes merely a part of reality, and we have
abandoned the monistic idealism which we profess
to have accepted.

Now it is not impossible to combine a sincere
Theism with the admission that God is not all and
did not make all. The old Greek philosophers ad-
mitted a vX-r), which was not created by God, though,
it could be partially and imperfectly controlled
by God, and made subservient to his ends. And
Dr. Martineau seems inclined to adopt a somewhat
similar view. To Origen and to the modern Plural-
ists souls are without beginning and coeternal with.
God. Now I do not myself feel disposed to take
refuge in such a view, much as it has to say for itself.
The pre-existence of souls seems to me a gratuitous
hypothesis, opposed to all the probabilities and
analogies which our experience suggests. On the
other hand, the pre-existence of matter seems alike
inconsistent with the modern science which declines
to distinguish matter from its laws and with an.

54

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

idealistic metaphysic which compels us to reject the
idea of a matter with a nature of its own independent
of the knowing subject. And it is not necessary,
because we think of God as limited, to think of Him
as limited by anything outside Himself. The limita-
tion springs from his own nature. All the theories-
by which philosophers and theologians have sought
to reconcile the facts of the world's history with the
perfect goodness of God really involve a certain
limitation of power. That is the conclusion to
which the actual existence of moral evil, when taken
in connexion with the condemnation of it by the
moral consciousness, seems to point. There is a,
sense in which God is finite. He is finite, not in the
sense of being limited by some external law or blind
overruling fate, by some thing or some person outside
Himself, but in the sense in which every thing that
is real is limited. It is difficult to see what the
negation of this last proposition would really mean.
Space is infinite, because space is not a thing ; it is
not real ; it is mere " form," a system of intellectual
relations in which all real things must find a place,
but not real in itself. The real is necessarily finite.
We may nevertheless think of God as infinite, inas-
much as He is not limited by anything outside
Himself, inasmuch as everything that is springs from
his perfectly righteous will and thought. When
theologians have interpreted infinitude as meaning
more than this, they have usually fallen into that
pantheistic optimism which ends by destroying
those moral convictions upon which all theology
rests. God is infinite because He is the ground of all
that is ; He is Omnipotent because He is the cause
of all that is ; He is infinitely good because He wills
the best that He has it in Him to produce. Such a
deity will be described by some as " anthropomor-
phic." I am content that it should be so. Some of
us will prefer an anthropomorphic Deity to the God
who is only matter disguised or a mere intellectual

55

GOD AND MAN

abstraction or a magnified devil. An anthropo-
morphic Deity in this sense, I venture to contend,
is the only Deity who satisfies the demands of our
rational and our moral nature. It is only by the
analogy of our own consciousness that we can form a
conception of " Spirit " at all, and if there be any
truth in idealism, God is Spirit.

VI. THE RELATION OF OUR CONCEPTION OF GOD TO

CHRISTIANITY

Such is the conception of God to which we are, as
it seems, led by the use of our Reason. It would take
me too long to enter upon a formal argument to show
that this conception of God is also that which is set
before us by Christianity, or (to be more definite) by
the religious teaching of Jesus Christ and by the
religious consciousness which is revealed in that
teaching. I simply put it to my readers that these
two conceptions are the same. And this is what we
might naturally expect if the teaching and the
personality of Christ are to be regarded as con-
stituting in any sense a divine revelation. For our
Lord Himself always appealed to the intrinsic
reasonableness of what He said as the proof and
confirmation of the truth of his doctrine. Because
Reason is capable of assenting to the truth of
religious teaching when once it is set before it, it
does not follow that Reason, or rather my Reason,
could have attained to the knowledge by its own
unassisted efforts. And yet this opposition between
unassisted and assisted Reason is really opposed to
the principle which finds in Christ the highest
manifestation under human limitations of the Divine
Thought. It was in Christ that the human Reason
first attained with complete self-consciousness to that
view of the divine nature which in a purely formal
way we have attempted to establish on metaphysical
and rational grounds. I say " in a purely formal

56

THE ULTIMATE BASTS OF THEISM

way," because all that we have hitherto said about
God's nature is that it is to be conceived of as
" mind " and as " good." The content which we
give to that idea will depend upon the concrete
standard which we adopt as our ideal of life ; and it
was because in Jesus Christ the moral as well as the
religious consciousness of man is felt to have attained
its highest development that Christians are able,
without any surrender of the claims of Reason or of
Conscience, to regard the teaching, the life, and the
character of Christ as constituting a " Revelation of
God."

To discuss the nature of Christ's teaching or of his
Personality or the meaning of " revelation " does not
form a part of our present aim. Still less is it
possible to ask in detail how far the dogmatic
teaching of the Church about the nature of God and
his revelation in Christ can be accepted consistently
with the philosophical position to which we have
been led. All that I can attempt is to point
out very briefly how the Theism for which
I have contended supplies a basis for a rational
interpretation of Christian doctrine.

(i) The view of the divine nature to which we have
been led is one which is essentially in harmony with
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine
of the Trinity is essentially a philosophical doctrine
a doctrine based upon data supplied by Christ's
own conception of God and his relation to Him
but still undeniably a metaphysical doctrine ; and
not the actual, explicit teaching of Christ. It had a
slow growth and a long development ; it cannot be
contended that it has at all times meant the same
thing. But I take the doctrine as it is presented to
us in the fully developed scholastic teaching of St.
Thomas Aquinas. We are there told that the " tres
Personae " are " tres proprietates " three essential
and eternally distinct attributes, as we might para-
phrase the term. God is essentially Power, Wisdom,

57

GOD AND MAN

and Will ; 'or (since the divine Will is always a will
for good) the Third Person of the Holy Trinity may
be equally described as " Goodness " or " Love." Is
not this precisely the view of God's nature to which
we have been led on purely rational grounds that
He is the Union of Power, Wisdom, and Goodness,
the will for the good springing from the union of
Power with Wisdom ? We shall also be prepared to
accept that scholastic doctrine, here still more closely
treading in the steps of the Platonising Fathers,
which sees in the Logos or Sapientia Dei the whole
world as eternally present in idea in the Divine
Mind, in Creation the gradual unfolding of that idea.
Even inanimate nature is part of the thought of
God ; He is still more fully revealed in the life of
souls with increasing fullness as animal life passes
into the intellectual, moral, and religious Hfe of
humanity. He is revealed in a pre-eminent degree
by the teachers and the prophets who have taught
the highest ideals of life and the worthiest views of
the divine nature. And for those to whom the
history of the world is really the work of a divine
Will, not the blind process of necessary development
in which the later stages are simply the products of
the earlier stages, there is no reason why that divine
Wisdom, who is God Himself, should not be regarded
as pre-eminently manifesting Himself once for all,
uniquely, in one historical personality. The personal
view of God's nature prepares the way for the idea
of a personal revelation.

(2) The rationality of the idea of an Incarnation
depends upon the view which is formed of the divine
nature and of the human. The view we have taken
of the divine nature is that human nature is the
same in principle with the divine. " God created
man in his own image." Every human soul is an
emanation from the divine, a reproduction of the
divine. But not all souls represent the divine in
equal measure. All who accept the idea of a God

58

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

who is good must admit that the better the soul and
the more profound its spiritual insight, the more
fully that soul can be regarded as representing or
revealing God. If an actual historical person is
actually pronounced by the moral and the religious
consciousness to embody the highest ideal of human
life and of the true relation between God and man,
such a person may be regarded on this ground alone
as in a unique sense a revelation of God.

By some it will probably be thought that this
view of the Incarnation would be more in harmony
with that view of the relation between God and man
which actually includes the consciousness of man in
God, which denies all real independence to the human
consciousness, and makes every man simply a phase
of the divine Being. Such a view is, as I have
ventured to contend, fatal to a really ethical view of
God. However little such a consequence may be
acknowledged, such a view must necessarily tend
either to transferring to God the badness of the bad
soul or else in denying that the bad soul is really bad..
The moral and the religious consciousness equally
demand that the human soul shall be regarded as a
distinct person, the human will as a distinct will
from God's. The divine Wisdom may be regarded
as present in the individual, iUuminating his under-
standing, inspiring his will more or less, in propor-
tion to the actual conformity between his will and
character and the divine Ideal. Similarly, when we
turn to the Christian doctrine of the Person of
Christ, the idea of an Incarnation loses all its value
when either (a) the divine Logos is thought of as
supplanting and taking the place of the human will
and understanding, as is virtually done by manjr
popular views of the Incarnation which have a.
strong tendency to Apollinarianism, or (b) the divine
Logos is thought of as equally present to all human
souls, or therefore as not present in any exceptional
sense in the Person of Christ. Without laying much

59-

GOD AND MAN

stress upon the technical refinements of the later
Catholic Christology, we may recognise in it a general
conformity with the demands of a philosophy based
on the " primacy of the practical Reason," inasmuch
as it recognises that (i) the divine Logos, present in
all souls to some extent and in some degree, was
pre-eminently present in the human soul of Christ,
and (2) that, however great the coincidence between
the moral and religious ideals, between the will, the
character of the human Jesus and of the God who
was revealing Himself in and through Hun, there
remain two natures, two wills, two natures, not one.

How far the historical facts enable us to attribute
.such a position to Christ is a separate problem.
Here I will merely add that it is essential to such a
"view of the Incarnation as has been inadequately
.suggested in these few sentences that there shall be
no claim for infallible or unlimited knowledge of
matters of fact on the part of the man Jesus Christ.
The doctrine of the limitation of Christ's human
knowledge, now so widely known and accepted
through the influence of Bishop Gore, is the necessary
presupposition of any view of the Incarnation which
can claim to be regarded as philosophical. It may
"be that our view of this limitation will have to be
carried somewhat further than would commend itself
to many of those who have been most prominently
associated with the doctrine. But it is not my
object here to develop a view of Incarnation, but to
leave room for one.

(3) A word must be said as to the bearing of Theism
of the kind here advocated upon the question of
Miracles. Apart from experience there is, so far as
I see, no reason why it should be assumed that the
course of nature should be uniform. By those who
think of God as a Will, the idea of a " miracle," in
the sense of an exception to the uniformities com-
monly prevailing among phsenomena, ought not to
be pronounced an a priori inconceivability. There is,

60

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

indeed, no difficulty about reconciling the " uniform-
ity of nature " with a miracle, even in the common
acceptance of the term, if we are prepared to admit
that the will of God or of some other " supernatural
being " may be included in that " sum of conditions "
which, from the scientific point of view, is regarded
as the cause of the phenomenon. A rational Deity
must be thought of as guiding his action upon some
intelligible and universal principle, and this principle
may be regarded as a " higher law," under which
both the ordinary course of nature and the excep-
tional event may be brought. But this is to use the
word " law " in a very different sense from that in
which the term is employed in science. Such
exceptional events would have to be thought of as
violations of what is ordinarily meant by the uni-
formity of nature of uniformity in that sense which
is presupposed by all ordinary scientific reasoning.
We might indeed hold that under similar " condi-
tions " the phenomenon would occur again, i.e.
when the purpose served by the exceptional event
could again be served by its repetition ; but this
inclusion of " final causes " among the " conditions ""
of a phenomenon violates all the assumptions upon
which ordinary scientific reasoning is based. 1 There
would be an end to the possibility of scientific
prediction were we to suppose that the question
whether a saint's finger will be chopped off by a
machine depends not upon the momentum of the
instrument at the moment before the introduction of
the finger, but upon the spiritual advantages to be
secured by the saving of the finger. I hold, there-
fore; that a miracle, in the common acceptation of
the term, would be really a violation of what is
commonly meant by the uniformity of nature, though
it would not be a violation of the law of causality.
Every event must have a cause, but the cause need

1 How far it is possible to explain biological phenomena without the
conception of " final cause " is a question on which I will not venture to
express an opinion.

6r

GOD AND MAN

not be one that works uniformly. 1 A violation of
the uniformity of nature in the sense explained I do
not regard as a priori inconceivable. The objection
to such a view is that all our experience of the actual
course of events goes to show that the ultimate
-cause does not work after this fashion, but in accord-
ance with general or uniform laws ; so that if all the
observable conditions of a phenomenon are correctly
observed, the recurrence of the conditions may be
expected to bring with it the recurrence of the
phenomenon.

Our knowledge of nature not being complete, we
cannot pronounce it inconceivable that there should
be exceptions to this procedure ; but the proba-
bilities against such exceptions are enormous. In
this as in other cases, probable reasoning is based
upon imperfect knowledge of causes. Moreover,
though the objection to the acceptance of a miracle
in the sense denned must be regarded as springing
from experience, the experience is so uniform in
-character as to suggest, though not to prove, that
there must be some reason in the nature of things
why such an event should be impossible. At all
events, to admit in practice the possibility of such
an event is to destroy the canons upon which not
only our ordinary reasoning about matters of science,
but in particular our ordinary canons of historical
criticism, are based. Postulates cannot be proved ;

1 " But why so confidently assume, we might reply, that a rigid and
monotonous uniformity is the only, or the highest, indication of the spirit
of order, the order of an everliving Spirit above all ? How is it then that
we depreciate machine-made articles, and prefer those in which the artistic
impulse, or the fitness of the individual case, is free to shape and to control
what is literally manufactured, hand-made ? . . . Dangerous as teleological
.arguments in general may be, we may at least safely say the world was not
designed to make science easy. ... To call the verses of a poet, the politics
-of a statesman, or the awards of a judge mechanical, implies, as Lotze has
pointed out, marked disparagement, although it implies, too, precisely
those characteristics exactness and invariability in which Maxwell
would have us see a token of the Divine." Dr. James Ward, Naturalism
and Agnosticism, I, pp. 108-9. I should hardly have ventured to put forth
so slight a suggestion of so unfashionable a view of Causality, but that I
am now able to refer the reader who may find it unsatisfying to this
brilliant work.

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

'but when they are denied, we have no longer a basis
for argument. Sincere Theists will, indeed, continue
to hold that it is not inconceivable that God should
liave governed the world otherwise than in accord-
ance with general laws (i.e. laws of uniform sequence),
"but, as He does not appear to do so, there must be
some good reason why He does not. We must
suppose that it is better that the world should be
governed by general laws. It is not a priori incon-
ceivable that in the whole course of history there
.should be one single exception to such a uniform
mode of action, but it may well be thought morally
inconceivable that any spiritually important con-
sequences should be dependent on the belief in an
historical event which would be so utterly incapable
of establishment by testimony as a supposed solitary
exception to an otherwise uniform course of nature.
But are what are commonly called miracles in-
consistent with the laws of nature ? Does this
general principle that natural laws are not " sus-
pended " necessarily involve the negation of any
alleged historical event for which we cannot account
consistently with the uniformity of nature ? It may
"be contended, indeed, that our knowledge of nature
is never so perfect as to enable us to exclude the
supposition of the interference with the ordinary
course of events (as it appears to ordinary observa-
tion) by a hitherto unsuspected law ; but practically
it may be said that there are many cases in which
our knowledge is really sufficient to exclude the
admissibility of such an event, if we do not wish to
plunge ourselves into a scepticism which would make
historical research and practical life alike impossible.
The actual suspension of the earth's motion or the
occurrence of any phenomenon which would produce
an apparent " stopping of the sun " may be said to
belong to this class. And I think it can hardly be
doubted that if this principle of criticism be adopted,
its application cannot be regarded as stopping with

63

GOD AND MAN

the Old Testament. The rising of the saints out of
the tomb with their bodies, and some of what are
called the " nature-miracles," may surely with
tolerable confidence be placed in this class. But we
must very narrowly limit the area in which it is
reasonable to exclude the possibility that extra-
ordinary, and to us unaccountable, events may have
occurred. When we come to the operations of mind,
it is questionable how far we can apply the idea of
" law " in its ordinary sense at all ; since no mental
phenomenon can be regarded as caused by ante-
cedent phenomena in the sense in which one physical
event causes another physical event, since the mind is
not merely a succession of psychical phenomena. 1
And it can hardly be denied that our knowledge of
the limits which are set by natural law to the control
capable of being exercised by mind on the phenom-
ena of organic nature, and still more by mind upon
mind, is extremely imperfect. We do know some-
thing of those limits. To suppose that the most
exceptionally endowed human soul could have
stopped the motion of the sun would be, as I have
contended, to reject the assumptions upon which all
historical research and all scientific reasoning pro-
ceed. But to suppose that some diseases can be
healed by mental means, that some persons possess
more power than others of such healing this is not
opposed to, but in conformity with what we know
of the action of mind upon the physical organism ;
nor can our present knowledge be held to exclude the
belief that one person may have had a power un-
paralleled in history of effecting such cures.

It may, indeed, be doubted whether the ordinary
action of the human will (putting aside altogether
the hypothesis of free will in the ordinary indeter-
minist sense) can be brought within the common
conception of the uniformity of nature. At some

1 1 here use the word " caused " in. the sense of Physical Science and.
common life. I have contended above that this uniformity of succession,
is not really a case of causation.

6 4

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

point or other, if the self is really a cause (however
little we may be able to say where such interference
begins), every voluntary act every case where a
physical event is determined by an idea there must
be an interference with the course of nature, as it
would be without the action of soul or mind. Every
such act does in a sense " violate the laws of nature. ""
But then experience teaches us the limits of such
violation. We know by experience that some
muscles are subject to voluntary control, and others
are not. We know that, while voluntary action does-
alter the direction of physical forces, it never sus-
pends the law of gravity or the conservation of
energy. 1 These experiences of the normal limits to>
the power of voluntary, i.e. mental, action enable us.
to formulate general rules which are reasonably
treated as themselves laws of nature. But as to>
what these limits are we are dependent entirely upon,
experience. And in some cases these limits cannot at
present be said to be fixed beyond the possibility of
reasonable doubt. I have myself a strong conviction
that the result of " psychical research " has already
to some extent brought, and may hereafter be to a
still greater extent able to bring, recorded events
which rationalistic criticism has commonly dismissed
as impossible within the limits of what may be
regarded as possible without any further violation of
the laws of nature than is implied in the normal
action of the human will. But there is no probability
that it will ever reverse the verdict which historical
criticism and the study of comparative religion have
passed on some other events recorded in the Old and
New Testaments. 2

To apply this principle to the criticism of the
Gospel narratives forms no part of my present
purpose. I will conclude with suggesting these

1 In so far as we are justified in assuming it at all. But cf. Ward, op.
cit., I, p. 214 sq., II, pp. 36 sq., 77 sq.

2 There are some interesting remarks on this subject by the late Mr.
Frederick Myers in his review of Renan in Modern Essays.

E 65

GOD AND MAN

principles as philosophical canons on the subject
(a) The idea of a suspension of natural law is not
a priori inadmissible.

(6) At the same time, since such an admission
would destroy all the criteria both of scientific and
historical reasoning, the admission of such a sus-
pension could not reasonably be accepted without
an amount of evidence which is practically unattain-
able in reference to the events of the distant past.

(c) The rejection of miracles in the popular sense
(i.e. suspension of natural law) is not incompatible
with the recognition of exceptional degrees of control
over the forces of physical nature by individual mind
and will.

(d) Our faith in the Incarnation must rest primar-
ily on other grounds than alleged miracles, and must
be of a kind which does not demand the occurrence
of physical miracles. At the same time faith in such
.an Incarnation may be reasonably strengthened by
the records of such an exceptional manifestation of
the forces of personality if the historical testimony
is sufficient.

(e) The probability of an alleged event of this
nature must depend partly upon the amount of
historical testimony in its favour, partly upon the
extent of the analogy between it and other events
for which we believe ourselves to have sufficient
evidence. While in the present state of opinion it is
extremely unwise to base any article of religious
belief upon the acceptance of disputed " psychical
phenomena," it may fairly be said that the results
of recent investigation have been very considerably
to widen our view of the possibilities of such personal
influences.

It forms no part of my task, as I have said, to apply
these considerations to the criticism of the Gospel
narratives, but I will allow myself one concluding
remark to prevent misunderstanding on the one hand
or on the other. I believe that it will be found that

66

THE ULTIMATE BASIS OF THEISM

a sober, historical criticism, based upon the principles
here suggested, will leave us in a modified form the
beliefs about Christ's Person which are most cher-
ished among ordinary Christians notably (i) the
general fact that much of his time was spent in the
healing of physical disease by means of extraordinary
spiritual capacities ; (2) that after his death there
occurred to his disciples visions of Himself which
were not mere subjective delusions, and which con-
firm for them and for us the fact of his continued
life and love for his followers. Belief in miracles, in
the sense which is here in question, may not be wholly
without spiritual value even now. But we may be
quite confident that for minds which have once
appreciated the principles of historical criticism, or
minds affected by the diffused scepticism which has
sprung from historical criticism, neither religious
faith in general, nor any doctrine of primary religious
importance, will ever depend mainly upon the
evidence of abnormal events recorded to have
happened in the remote past. Criticism must be
wholly free ; though when it is seen that faith is
independent of miracles, it may become less destruc-
tive on the one side and less desperately apologetic
on the other. Belief in God will rest in the long run
upon the instinctive rejection of materialism by the
common sense of mankind, confirmed by the reflective
analysis of the philosopher. Belief in His goodness
will rest upon the testimony of the moral conscious-
ness. For minds which dare not explain away or
minimise the presence of evil in human life, belief
in Immortality will be a corollary of that goodness.
Belief in Christ as the supreme, unique Revealer of
God will rest upon the testimony of the same moral
consciousness, recognising and welcoming its own
ideal in Him. " No man can say that Jesus is Lord
but by the Holy Ghost." " He that is of the light
cometh to the light."

67

II

CHRIST AS THE LOGOS AND THE SON OF

GOD *

THERE is, I think, a growing demand that modern
Theologians should say in quite definite terms what
they really mean when they use the traditional
language about the " Divinity of Christ." It is not
easy to do this in a brief paper, but I will try.
I trust you will forgive the appearance of dogmatism
which must be involved in such a summary state-
ment of conclusions, without much argument or
defence.

In the first place it will be well to enumerate some
of the things which we do not and cannot mean by
ascribing Divinity to Christ.

(i) Jesus did not claim Divinity for Himself. He
may have called Himself, or more probably allowed
Himself to be called, the Messiah or Son of God.
But never in any critically well-attested sayings is
there anything which suggests that His conscious
relation to God was other than that of a man towards.
God the attitude which He wished that all men
should adopt towards God. The speeches of the
Fourth Gospel, where they go beyond the Synoptic
conception, cannot be regarded as history, valuable
as they may be for theology. 2 The doctrine of our
Lord's Divinity must be taken to express the

1 Reprinted from the Modern Churchman, Vol. XI, pp. 278-286 (Sep-
tember, 1921). A paper read to the Churchmen's Union Annual Con-
ference, 1921, at Girton College, Cambridge. The general subject dealt,
with at that Conference was " Christ and the Creeds." This paper was
also printed in the volume Jesus Human and Divine. EDD.

2 1 do not know of any scholar, however orthodox and conservative,,
who affirms that the discourses of Christ in the Fourth Gospel are verbatim
reports, or denies that they are more or less coloured by the ideas of the-
Evangelist. Their whole tone and style is obviously so different from that
of the Synoptic Gospels, that, if we accept the Synoptic discourses as-
substantially authentic (though not of course in every detail, for there
are considerable discrepancies between them), it is impossible to regard the
Johannine discourses as equally accurate reports : and even in this Gospel-
few sentences (when taken apart from the Preface, which does not pretend
to represent the words of Jesus, and other comments of the Evangelist),
imply actual " Godhead " in the sense of post-Nicene theology. " Is it
not written in your law, I said [to the Judges of Israel], Ye are gods ? If
he called them "gods unto whom the word of God came . . . say ye of Him,.

68

CHRIST AS LOGOS AND SON OF GOD

Church's conception of what Jesus is or should be
to His followers, and to the world, not His own
theory about Himself.

(2) It obviously follows from this admission that
Jesus was in the fullest sense a man, as much so as
any other human being, that He had not merely a
human body, but a human soul, intellect, will. 1
This was not always recognised by the Church.
Many of the earlier Greek fathers Irenaeus, for
instance, and Athanasius obviously thought of
Him simply as the Logos of God residing in a human
body. Later councils condemned this position in the
person of Apollinarius : from the point of view of
later theology it cannot be too strongly asserted that
Athanasius was an ApoUinarian. 2 And I fear a
great many people who now think themselves
particularly orthodox are really Apollinarians too.
I have known quite advanced " Catholics " not by
any means stupid or ignorant people who simply

whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest,
because I said, I am the Son of God ? " The claim to be the Son of God
does not necessarily imply " Godhead." This requires to be still more
remembered in the Synoptists.' The Jews, however highly some of them
may have exalted the Messiah, never thought of him as God or as equal
Tvith God. However close the union which the Christ of the Synoptists
feels to exist between Himself and God, the distinction is always preserved.
The claim that He would judge the world (if actually made) would not
imply " Godhead." Cf. Acts xvii. 31 : "A day, in the which He will
judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He hath ordained."
It is clear that till the Confession at Csesarea Philippi, Jesus had not
claimed to be the Messiah or Son of God, and (if we accept all the words
subsequently said to have been uttered by Him) He never claimed more
than this. Even Luke x. 22, though it implies a very high conception of
His own Divine Mission, does not imply " Godhead."

1 " Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh
.subsisting " (Athanasian Creed). The last words are obviously explanatory
of the term " man." The reasonable soul is the human soul.

2 In his earlier days. In the period when he wrote the De Incarnations
(before the Nicene Council) and almost as distinctly in the Orations against
the Avians, there is no trace of any distinct recognition of a human soul in
Jesus ; the Logos seems simply to take the place of the human soul. In
Ms later days (when the question began to be discussed) he did formally
recognise the existence of a human soul, but it may be doubted how far
this admission really affected his general way of thinking. See my book
The Idea of the Atonement, pp. 299, 300, and two letters of mine in answer
to Canon Lacey in The Guardian of November 4 and 18, 1921. [Cf. also
the paper entitled " The Christology of Saint Athanasius " in the present
volume. EDD.J

6 9

GOD AND MAN

did not know that the Church teaches that Christ
had a human soul. When a Sunday-school teacher
asks his class, " Who was Jesus Christ ? " and tries
to elicit the answer, " God," without the addition of
the all-important " and man," he too is teaching
Apollinarianism. Much so-called orthodoxy is really
ApoUinarianism ; and some defenders of the Catholic
faith, who are too well informed to become down-
right Apollinarians, are really under the influence
of that heresy in the later reduced form of it which
denied that Christ had a human will. It is curious
to note that that fiery malleus hereticorum, the
Bishop of Zanzibar, quite definitely lapses into
Monothelitism.

(3) It is equally unorthodox to suppose that the
human soul of Jesus pre-existed. There is simply no
basis for such a doctrine unless (with Origen) we say
that all human souls exist before their birth into the
world : but that is not the usually accepted Catholic
position. St. Paul, indeed, believed in the pre-
existence of the heavenly Messiah or Son of God
without distinguishing between the human and the
Divine or semi-divine Christ but from the time
when the Logos Christology was accepted by the
Church it has been held that what pre-existed was
the Divine Logos, not the human Jesus.

(4) The Divinity of Christ does not necessarily
imply the Virgin Birth or any other miracle. The
Virgin Birth, if it could be historically proved, would
be no demonstration of Christ's Divinity, nor would
the disproof of it throw any doubt upon that doc-
trine. Two Synoptic Gospels, which do not assert
the Divinity of Christ, do in their present form nar-
rate the Virgin Birth. The Fourth Gospel, which
does assert the Divinity of the Logos, knows nothing
of the Virgin Birth.

(5) The Divinity of Christ does not imply omni-
science. Since the appearance of Bishop Gore's
Bampton Lectures, it has been unnecessary to labour

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CHRIST AS LOGOS AND SON OF GOD

that point, though the doctrine of a limitation of
Christ's knowledge has not yet sunk into the popular
mind. We still hear the conclusions of the higher
criticism refuted by appeals to our Lord's acquie-
scence in the common Jewish views about the author-
ship or date of Old Testament books. I must add
that Bishop Gore himself does not push his admission
to anything like the point which is imperatively-
demanded by an honest and critical study of the
Gospel narratives. There is no more reason for
supposing that Jesus of Nazareth knew more than
His contemporaries about the true scientific explana-
tion of the mental diseases which current belief
attributed to diabolic possession, than that He knew
more about the authorship of the Pentateuch or the
Psalms. 1 And even if we reduce (as I personally am
disposed to do) the genuine eschatological sayings to
a minimum, it is difficult to deny that our Lord
entertained some expectations about the future
which history has not verified. 2

So much for the negative side. In what sense do
these admissions allow of our still attributing
Divinity to Jesus, and finding a permanent meaning
in the formulae of the Creeds and the Councils ?
Everything turns upon our conception of the true
relation between God and man in general and that
is a vast problem which it is impossible here to
discuss. I can only say this much. If " Divine "
and " human " are thought of as mutually exclusive
terms, if God is thought of as simply the Maker of
man, if man is thought of as merely a machine or an

1 This does not imply (as is sometimes suggested) that in the spiritual
region He " knew no more than an ordinary man." The idea of Christ as
the supreme Revealer of God obviously implies the contrary.

a Personally I think it probable that all the more definite statements
about a " coming again " and a supernatural Judgment in the immediate
future are due to the ideas of the disciples rather than to Christ Himself,
but it would be disastrous to make the Divinity of Christ depend upon a
particular answer to this most difficult problem. We know that our Lord
did not claim to know the date of the Judgment, but to contend that He
never used any of the current Apocalyptic phrases suggestive of a date
nearer than. 1900 years would involve a somewhat drastic dealing with the
documents.

7*

GOD AND MAN

animal having no community of nature with the
Universal Spirit who is the cause or source or
*' ground " of the existence alike of Nature and of
other spirits, then indeed it would be absurd to
maintain that one human being, and one only, was
both God and man at the same time. But such a
view of the relation between God and man would
not at the present day be accepted by any philosophy
which finds any real place for God in its conception
of the universe.

That man is not merely the creature and plaything
of God, that there is a certain community of nature
between God and man, that all human minds are
reproductions "in limited modes" (to use the
expression of my old master, T. H. Green) of the
Divine Mind, that in all true human thinking there
is a reproduction of the Divine thought, and above
all that in the highest ideals which the human
conscience recognises there is a revelation of the
ideal eternally present in the Divine Mind these are
the presuppositions under which alone any real
meaning can be given to the doctrine. All modern
philosophers who recognise that the knowledge of
God is possible are agreed that we can only attain
such knowledge by thinking of Him in the light of
the human mind at its highest. And philosophical
teachers have not been slow to identify this view
with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation,
however severely they may criticise the form which
the doctrine has received in the traditional theology.
Professor Pringle-Pattison, for instance, in his Idea
of God (a work of which I would speak with profound
admiration), has written :

" We are far too apt to mechanise the great
doctrine of the Incarnation, which forms the
centre of the Christian faith. Whatever else it
may mean, it means at least this that in the
conditions of the highest human life we have

72

CHRIST AS LOGOS AND SON OF GOD

access, as nowhere else, to the inmost nature of
the Divine. ' God manifest in the flesh ' is a more
profound philosophical truth than the loftiest
flight of speculation that outsoars all predicates
and, for the greater glory of God, declares Him
unknowable." *

He goes on to complain, as philosophers usually
do, that this "Incarnation of the Son has been
limited to a single individual." 2

I quite agree with him that it is impossible to
maintain that God is fully incarnate in Christ and
not incarnate at all in anyone else. On the other
hand, the philosophical critics of theology do not,
as it appears to me, recognise how spiritually value-
less nay, how ethically pernicious such a doctrine
becomes when God is thought of as incarnating
Himself equally in all human beings, the worst as
well as the best. If we say " human nature is
Divine," and stop there, we enter upon a line of
thought which ends in the Hindoo theology or the
very similar Absolutist philosophy which recognises
no cosmic significance in human morality, and places
God " beyond good and evil." There is much in
human nature which is not Divine at all. It is just
because it so emphatically negatives such a non-
moral doctrine of Divine immanence that the
Christian doctrine of a supreme Incarnation in one
historical Person becomes so valuable. Professor
Pringle-Pattison himself (who is no Absolutist,
though he is too fond of Absolutist phrases which,
I venture to think, do not express his real belief)
recognises that it is " in the conditions of the highest
human life that we have access as nowhere else to
the inmost nature of the Divine." If we once
recognise that it is especially in the moral conscious-
ness at its highest, and in the lives which are most
completely dominated by such a moral consciousness,

1 The Idea of God, p. 157. 2 Ibid., p. 409.

73

GOD AND MAN

that God is revealed, then it becomes possible to
accept the doctrine that in a single human life God
is revealed more completely than in any other. If
we believe that every human soul reveals, reproduces,
incarnates God to some extent ; if we believe that in
the great ethical teachers of mankind, the great
religious personalities, the founders, the reformers of
religions, the heroes, the prophets, the saints, God is
more fully revealed than in other men ; if we believe
that up to the coming of Christ there had been a
gradual, continuous, and on the whole progressive
revelation of God (especially, though by no means
exclusively, in the development of Jewish Mono-
theism), then it becomes possible to believe that in
One Man the self-revelation of God has been signal,
supreme, unique. That we are justified in thinking
of God as like Christ, that the character and teaching
of Christ contains the fullest disclosure both of the
character of God Himself and of His will for man
that is (so far as so momentous a truth can be
summed up in a few words) the true meaning for us
of the doctrine of Christ's Divinity.

Such at bottom is the permanent meaning of that
doctrine of the Logos and the Holy Trinity in which
this conviction clothed itself under the influence of
Greek philosophical conceptions and terminology.
The doctrine of the Logos grew up at a time when
the Neoplatonic idea of the transcendence of God,
His aloofness from the world, His inaccessibility to
human thought or effort, had been pushed to a point
which made it seem impossible that He should
express Himself in created things or created minds
without some sort of intermediary. The Reason or
Thought or Word of God the thought concept, be
it remembered, rather than the spoken word was
conceived of as such an intermediary. God gave
birth to the Logos and the Logos gave birth to the
world. In the books of Proverbs and Wisdom the
Logos, or rather the Wisdom of God (which is

74

CHRIST AS LOGOS AND SON OF GOD

practically the same conception), is personified in a
semi-poetic manner as the Assessor who stood at
God's right hand in the creation of the universe.
In the Alexandrian Jew Philo the idea becomes more
metaphysical. Practically everything that is said of
the Word or the Son in the Fourth Gospel is said of
the Logos in Philo, except his incarnation in the
historic Jesus. In Philo the conception of the Logos
has no connexion at all with the Messianic idea.
That is the original thought of the Fourth Gospel
the master-stroke of its author's genius. But St.
Paul, by attributing to Jesus all that the Apoca-
lyptists had said about the heavenly Son of God or
Messiah, had reached along another path much the
same conception of the Messiah as the Fourth
Evangelist expressed by saying that the Word was
made flesh and dwelt among us. And the Johannine
doctrine had great advantages over the Pauline. It
was much less associated with Apocalyptic mythol-
ogy. It made it possible to admit that the human
Jesus had a beginning in time like other men, and to
confine pre-existence to the Divine element in the
historic Personality. Moreover, instead of present-
ing Christ as a semi-Divine being hovering between
the Divine and the human, it enabled the theologian
to say frankly that that in Jesus which was human
was absolutely human, while that in Hun which was
Divine was absolutely Divine.

There remained, indeed, the problem of the
relation between this " Word " which was God and
yet incarnate in the human Jesus, and the Father-
God, whose only begotten Son He was. Was this
Word personal or impersonal ? If personal, how can
we escape Polytheism ? And if the Logos be identi-
fied with the One God, what becomes of the distinc-
tion between Father and Logos ? I cannot here
sketch the history of that long controversy out of
which the orthodox Christology was eventually
evolved, but I should like to note two or three points

75

GOD AND MAN

which are valuable for the modern reinterpretation
of the doctrine.

(1) In the more philosophical Fathers such as
Justin, and above all Origen, it was quite distinctly
admitted that the Logos was not united to Jesus
alone. He had dwelt in the Prophets. He had
inspired Socrates and Plato. It was asserted only
that the incarnation in Jesus was something supreme
and unique. 1

(2) Many of the earlier Fathers did not quite'
definitely tend to think of the Logos as a distinct
personality a separate mind, will, centre of con-
sciousness from the Father : the Son before the
Incarnation was thought of as related to the Father
very much as, for an intelligent pagan, Apollo was
related to Zeus ; but the more distinct the person-
ality the more definite also is the subordination.
When Athanasius made the Divine Son equal to the
Father, co-eternal, " of the substance of the Father,"
he was distinctly an innovator, but an innovator
who saved the Church from the Polytheism into
which it was drifting. In making the distinction
between the Father and the Logos a distinction
within the nature of the one Divine Being, he
prepared the way for a more philosophical and
genuinely monotheistic interpretation of the Logos
doctrine and of that doctrine of the Trinity which
had grown out of it.

(3) In St. Augustine, and still more distinctly in
St. Thomas Aquinas and the Schoolmen generally, it
becomes evident that nothing is left of that older

1 Here are two illustrations of Origen's Christology :
" We say that the Logos was united and made one with the soul of
Jesus in a far higher degree than any other soul, seeing that He alone was
-able completely to receive the highest participation in the true Word and
the true Wisdom and the true Righteousness " (Contra Celsum, v. 39 ;
Lommatzsch, xix. 241).

" They see that from Him the Divine and the human nature began to
be united (lit. woven together), so that human nature might become
Divine by participation in the more Divine, not in Jesus alone, but also
in all those who not only believe but also take up the life which Jesus
-taught " (Contra Celsum, iii. 28 ; Lommatzsch, xviii. 287).

76

CHRIST AS LOGOS AND SON OF GOD

conception of Christ as a distinct, a " second " and.
inferior God which is found in Justin and the earlier
Fathers. The Logos now becomes not a separate
mind, but a distinguishable activity of the one and
only Divine Mind. The Son is the Wisdom of God,
as the Father is His Power and the Holy Ghost His
Love, and the three constitute " One Mind." It is
difficult to say what Tertullian originally meant
when he first introduced the fatal term " Persons "
as the name for these distinctions within the Divine
Mind, but it is evident the term " Person " is now
(in Augustine and St. Thomas) used in a very
technical sense and a sense quite different from that
in which it is used either in popular speech or in the
language of modern philosophy. It cannot be too
emphatically asserted that, when traditionalists like
Canon Mason, and even philosophical and rational
theolcfgians like Canon Peter Green, speak of the
three " Persons " of the Trinity as three minds or
centres of consciousness and frankly deny that God
is One Mind, it is they and not those whom they
criticise who are heretics from the standpoint of
Augustinian and scholastic orthodoxy. To St.
Thomas, as to the ordinary modern philosopher,,
their position would have been Tritheism, pure and
simple.

There is undoubtedly much in the fully developed
scholastic doctrine, and still more in the earlier
theology out of which it grew, which is of no intrinsic
value at the present day. All of it requires transla-
tion into the language of modern thought, and some
of it, it must be frankly confessed, almost defies such
translation. The conception of the Logos taken by
itself, apart from its Christian application, is one for
which modern philosophy has no use. But that does
not prevent our seeing in the fully developed doctrine
of the Person of Christ the expression in the language
of a bygone philosophy of that which still is and,
I believe, always will be the central truth of

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GOD AND MAN

Christianity, viz. that in the life and character, the
teaching and the Personality of Jesus Christ the
world has received its highest revelation of God, a
revelation, however, which is still being continued
and further developed by the work of God's Spirit
in other human minds, and particularly in the society
of Christ's followers.

That is, at bottom, I believe, what we mean when
we speak of the Divinity of Christ. To justify the
central position which it ascribes to Jesus in the
religious history of the world would require an
elaborate examination of the teaching and life of
Jesus, and the comparison of His religion with other
religions and other systems of religious and moral
teaching. And yet after all the truth of such a
conception could not be in the ordinary sense
" proved." The truth of a moral ideal is a matter of
immediate judgment,- The doctrine of a supreme
revelation of God in Christ must ultimately rest
upon the affirmation of the moral consciousness that
in its essential principles that moral ideal which is
most fully incarnated in Christ's teaching and His
life is still the truest and the highest that we know.

78

Ill

THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS *

MODERNISTS are sometimes accused of not believing
in the Divinity of Christ because some of us do not
"believe two things :

(i) That there existed before the birth of Christ a
Son or Word of God who was " personally " distinct
from God the Father, and (2) that there was between
this Word and the historical Jesus a complete
" personal identity."

Now I would observe, in the first place, that the
Nicene Creed says nothing whatever about " person-
ality," whether in its technical theological sense, or
in its ordinary modern sense. Still less is anything
.said about " personal identity." The idea belongs
to an interpretation of the Creed not to the Creed
itself ; and people ought not to be accused of not
believing either the doctrine of Christ's Divinity or
the Nicene definition of it because they do not accept
.a particular interpretation of its language. And,
secondly, I would point out that our opponents do
not always define the sense in which they use the
word " personality." They leave us to assume that
they use it in the modern sense of the term in
exactly the same sense in which it is commonly said
that I am one person and the reader another person.
Thus Bishop Gore writes :

" The Personality of Him who appeared on earth,
Jesus Christ, did not begin with his human birth,
but was the Personality of an eternal Person, the
Eternal Son of God."

If Personality is not to be understood in the
modern sense, there is not even a plausible ground for
saying, " I feel sure that for Dr. Rashdall the Person
of Jesus began to exist when He was born of human
parentage." It is true that, even when we accept

1 Reprinted, with considerable modifications, from the Modern Church-
man, Vol. XII, pp. 6-27 (April, 1922).

79

GOD AND MAN

this identification of the theological with the modem
sense of the term, vast questions might be raised
as to the real meaning and interpretation of human
personality. To some extent they should be dis-
cussed in any work which pretends to give anything
like a philosophical account of the doctrine of
Christ's Divinity. But I am not now writing such
a treatise, and I am content to assume that we know
what we mean when we apply the term " person "
to an individual human being : and this is the
sense in which, so far as appears, conservative writers-
insist upon our treating Jesus Christ as, before the
Incarnation no less than after it, a Person distinct
from the Person of the Father, and as the same
Person with the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Now
I propose to ask whether this is the true meaning,,
or the only possible meaning, of the Nicene Creed.
And as a means to answering this question I think
it will be useful to examine what was the belief of
Athanasius on the subject, to compare what he
believed with what these conservative writers appar-
ently believe, and to ask whether the two beliefs can.
be identified.

Many champions of Traditionalism are fond of
talking about the " mind " of the Nicene Council,
and of assuming that the clergy of the Church of
England at the present day are bound to accept the
doctrines of that famous Assembly in the sense in.
which the Fathers of Nicaea held them. There is,,
as it seems to me, a certain absurdity in asking what
was the " mind " of 318 persons. Anyone with a.
little experience of the ways of ecclesiastical or
political assemblies knows very well that the for-
mulae which they agree upon frequently fail to
represent the opinions of the majority who vote for
them, or even of the majority of that majority, and
that, in so far as they are really accepted, it is only
because they are understood in a variety of senses.
And in the particular case of the Nicene Council,.

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CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

there is a peculiar absurdity in talking about its
" mind." The Creed was from the first accepted by
a large part of the Assembly as a compromise, and
as soon as the Council broke up, its members imme-
diately fell asunder into groups and parties which
interpreted the decisions in different ways, and some
of which wanted to go back upon those decisions just
on the ground that they did not represent what they
considered to be the true mind of the Assembly.
Moreover, even if we could ascertain the mind of the
Nicene Fathers, I should contend that clergymen of
our Church, or of any Church which includes the
Creed in its Confession of Faith, are not in any way
bound to accept their formulae in the sense which
they put upon them. They are not bound by the
decisions of that or any other General Council except
in so far as they are embodied in the Creeds or other
formulas of the Church to which they give their
assent : and whatever difference of opinion there
may be as to the extent of the latitude which may
be allowed to the clergy in interpreting them, there
is not the least pretence for saying that they must
necessarily be accepted in the sense which from ex-
ternal evidence we may suppose that the majority
of the Council intended. Least of all are we bound
to agree with the personal opinions of Athanasius.
But, subject to these reserves, Athanasius may, I
think, reasonably be accepted as representing, so far
as any individual can do, the " mind " of the Nicene
Council.

ATHANASIUS ON THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF
THE WORD

In the first place, I will ask what sort of pre-
existence the Logos possessed according to Athana-
sius. For my own part I can fully assent to the
doctrine that the Logos was a distinct Person of the
Holy Trinity in the technical and theological sense

F 81

GOD-ANDMAN

of the term " Person " ; and I also think that
Athanasius held the same belief, so far as one can
express what he believed in the terms of a theology
which was not then fully formulated. The Latin
term " Persona " is, of course, not used in the Nicene
Creed at all, nor is either of the terms which have at
different times been accepted as its proper Greek
equivalent " Prosopon," generally rejected as
savouring too much of Sabellianism, or what after-
wards became the orthodox term, " Hypostasis."
This last term is indeed used in the Anathemas
.attached to the Creed, but in a quite different sense.
It is treated in these Anathemas as the equivalent of
Ousia, and an anathema is hurled against those who
say that the Son is of a different " Ousia or Hypos-
tasis " from the Father. The original meaning of
these two terms was practically the same : and the
theological meaning for the Council and for Athana-
sius in the time of the Council was still the same.
Those who talked about three Hypostases talked
also about three Ousiai ; to talk about three Hypos-
tases or three Ousiai was at present a note of
Arianism. Those who maintained that there was in
the Godhead one Ousia maintained that there "was
one Hypostasis, and were accused by their enemies of
Sabellianism for doing so. To this category Athana-
sius belonged. By a large part of the Christian
world Athanasius was for a long period habitually
regarded as a Sabellian, along with Marcellus of
Ancyra, with whom Athanasius eventually disagreed,
"but whom he would never treat as a heretic.
This fact must always be borne in mind when we
endeavour to interpret the language of Athanasius.
Now undoubtedly Athanasius was not really a
Sabellian. He quite distinctly asserted that the
Father was not the Son, and the distinction which he
recognised between Father and Son was an eternal
distinction, not (as with the Sabellians) one that
could be put off and on. But it must not be assumed

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CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

that he would have recognised the distinction
"between them as equivalent to what we mean by
a distinction of personalities. Even if we could
assume that " hypostasis " really meant what
" persona " meant for Latin theology, and that that
meaning was equivalent to our modern term " per-
son," we could not say that Athanasius treated the
distinction between Father and Son as a distinction
of " Persons " : for Athanasius treats Father and
Son as having the same " hypostasis." But it may
"be suggested that, though he did not use the term,
he habitually treated the difference between Father
and Son as being of the kind which we should call a
difference of personality. Now I do not deny that
there are passages which point in this direction.
When he is speaking of the Incarnate Son, he does
this habitually ; and there are passages in which he
applies to the distinction between Father and Son,
even before and apart from the Incarnation, language
which could most naturally be held to express a
difference of personality especially when actually
quoting passages of Scripture which he believed to
refer to the relation between Father and Son. I do
not 'profess to make Athanasius wholly consistent or
wholly intelligible. I do not believe it possible to
express in intelligible modern language exactly how
Athanasius understood the relation between God the
Father and the Word. He was not much of a
Philosopher: his whole position rested upon exegesis;
and he was bound to believe equally passages in the
Old Testament, irrelevant or wrongly interpreted
passages in the New Testament, pieces of tradition
or judgments of extra-canonical authorities which
really represented a number of quite inconsistent
views. To some extent he would no doubt have
professed himself unable fully to reconcile these
contradictions, or to present a clear and perfectly
intelligible account of the relation between the
Father and the pre-existent Son ; but of this I am

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GOD AND MAN

quite sure that, so far as he had any intelligible
theory of the matter, it was not that view of the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity which, by failing to
distinguish the ancient and the modern sense of
" Person/' and holding a doctrine of three persons
has a definitely tritheistic character.

The Arians, be it remembered, regarded Christ as
God, but as a different God from the Father differ-
ent and inferior. They believed in a Trinity, but
they did not believe in an " undivided " Trinity.
The meaning of the Homo-ousion and of a clause in
the original Nicene Creed which Athanasius regarded
as more important than the " Homo-ousion " (" from
the Ousia of the Father "), was precisely this that
there were not two divine Minds or three, but one.
Whatever for him was the nature of the distinction
between Father and Son, it was not a distinction
between the one eternal God and another inferior,
created God or demi-god, but a distinction within
the Being of the One and Only God and an eternal
distinction. The Logos did not owe His existence
to any act of the Father's will, any " begetting " in
time : the Logos was an element in His eternal
Being. Never does Athanasius, in trying to explain
or illustrate this distinction, use language which
suggests the notion of two distinct minds. He
repudiates as forcibly as he can the Arian notion that
the Three are One simply because of their complete
harmony and agreement, which is very much the
popular modern conception. He compares the rela-
tion between them to the relation between the fount
and the stream, the luminous body and its rays
physical metaphors which may strike us as wholly
inapplicable to mental existence, but which at all
events suggest an identity much greater than any
which can be supposed to exist between one mind,
and another mind. And it is not only negatively
that Athanasius excludes personal difference. What-
ever we may mean by " personality " in the modern

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CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

sense, we certainly mean the possession of knowledge.
If the Father and the Son are two Persons in the
modern sense, the Father must have knowledge, and
the Son must have knowledge ; there are two con-
sciousnesses, each of which knows just as two human
persons may know the same thing without forming
one knowing mind. That which they know may be
the same thing : but, psychologically speaking, there
will be not one knowledge, but two knowledges, not
one knowing mind, but two. The fact that one
ceased to know would not affect the knowledge of the
other. But this is not at all Athanasius's conception
of the Father's relation to the Son. The Logos is the
Wisdom of God : and there is no other Wisdom of
God. The Father does not know except through the
Logos. And this is no mere inference of mine. He
expressly urges the point against the Arians. The
Arians thought that the Son had a beginning in tune,
and was created by a deliberate act of the Father's
will : the very idea of Sonship implied, they con-
tended, a Being who existed before the Son existed,
and was meaningless on any other assumption. But
this, Athanasius argues, is impossible: if the
Wisdom (i.e. Logos or Son) of God was created, then
before that creation the Father could not have had
even the thought of creating the Son or the World
through Him, for the Father thinks only in or by
means of the Son. 1 The Son, in fact, is His know-
ledge. The Son is God Himself as knowing and as
creating, including in some sense the world which is
created through Him, the Word. Athanasius takes
quite seriously and. literally the idea that the Son is
the actual thinking of the Father : the Father
without the Son could not think : and therefore, of
course, the Father could not exist without the Son.
It would be scarcely possible to repudiate more
formally the view ascribed to him by some present

I 0r. contra Arianos, III, 61 63; De Synodis, 18, 52; De Sentent.
Dianysii. 23.

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GOD AND MAN

day writers that Father and Son are personally
distinct in the modern sense. If they are personally
distinct, then according to modern ideas (for those
who do not merge human personality in " the
Absolute") they are " outside " one another : and this
is just what (according to Athanasius) they are not.

" The Word is not outside Him " (i.e. the

Father). 1
" Father and Son are one and the same Mind." 2

I contend that so far my own interpretation of
Christ's Divinity is much nearer " the mind " of
Athanasius and of the Council than that of many of
my conservative critics. With Athanasius I inter-
pret the Logos to mean the Wisdom or Thought of
God. Sometimes Athanasius adopts a position
which could only be justified by a more thorough-
going Idealism than perhaps he would deliberately
adopt. " The Word of the Father is aU things."*
I suspect that, if this sentence had been found in a
number of the Modern Churchman, it would have
been quoted to show that all " Modernists " are
Pantheists. At times Athanasius tells us also that
the Son is the Will of the Father. God's Wisdom 4
of course is distinguishable from His Power and His
Love, but that Wisdom is not a separate Mind or
Person in the modern sense. If God is one God, He
must be one Mind. Anyone who is prepared to
accept this, would find it hard, I think, to distinguish
his view from mine. If he is not, he differs from
Athanasius. All this is upon the assumption that
" Person " is used in the modern sense.

THE APOLLINARIANISM OF ST. ATHANASIUS

How far can the belief that the historical Jesus is
personally identical with the pre-existent Logos or

1 Or. contra Arianos, III, 62. - Ibid., Ill, 5.

8 Ibid., III. 67. * Ibid., Ill, 63, ad fin.

86

CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

Son of God be attributed to Athanasius ? There is a
difficulty in answering this question because, as we
have seen, it is improbable that Athanasius regarded
the Son as a different " Person " (in the modern
sense) from the Father. But we can have no
difficulty in saying that whatever sort of distinctness
from the Father the pre-existent Son possessed, that
sort of distinctness was possessed also by the Incar-
nate, so far as the Mind (and not the body) of the
Incarnate is concerned. Or rather we might say
that practically the Incarnate possessed (as it would
appear to us, though Athanasius might have repu-
diated it) greater distinctness : for most of the
passages in which the distinctness of the Son
from the Father is emphasised relate to the Word
after the Incarnation rather than before it. But
if we waive this difficulty, there is no doubt
whatever that for Athanasius Jesus Christ was
in the most literal sense the Word of God as
much God, and in the same sense God, as the
Father.

In all the earlier writings of Athanasius there is
not the least trace of the belief that there was in
Christ a human soul. Here are a few of the passages
which seem to me to prove that Athanasius was
practically an Apollinarian :

(i) " Accordingly, when inspired writers on this
matter speak of Him as eating and being born ;
understand that the body, as body, was born, and
sustained with food corresponding to its nature,
while God, the Word Himself, who was united
with the body, while ordering all things, also by the
works He did in the body showed Himself to be not
man, but God the Word. But these things are
said of Him, because the actual body which ate,
was born, and suffered, belonged to none other but
to the Lord : and because, having become man, it
was proper for these things to be predicated of

87

GOD AND MAN

Him as man, 1 to show Him to have a body in
truth, and not in seeming." *

The body only is mentioned, and that repeatedly.
The incarnate Jesus had a body in truth : not a
word about a soul. Does not that imply that to
Athanasius Jesus was not really man at all, but
seemed to be man because the Word spoke and
thought in a human body ? This involved a nearer
approach to Docetism than we find in Apollinarius
himself, who admitted a sensitive but not a rational
soul. It seems pretty clearly implied that the mind
which inhabited that human body did not really feel
pain at all. It is a little more possible to bring the
idea of a sensitive soul within Athanasius's language,
because a sensitive soul might, in a sense, be regarded
as belonging to the body, but the distinction is
nowhere made by Athanasius.

(2) " Did He not then hunger ? Yes ; He
hungered agreeably to the properties of the Body.
But He did not perish of hunger, because of the
Word that wore it." 3

In the Orations against the Arians the same ten-
dency is obvious, if it is less prominent. I cannot
find in them any passage which shows that Athana-
sius thought there was in Christ any consciousness
except the consciousness of the divine Word still
less any rational consciousness. One of my critics
has appealed to what he says about Christ's ignorance
as a proof to the contrary : but Athanasius does not
attribute this ignorance to the soul, but to the flesh.
In reply to those who insisted upon the fact of the
Lord asking questions in proof of the limitation of
His knowledge, he says :

" If He knew what He was doing, therefore not in

1 1 have used Bishop Robertson's translation. I should myself be
disposed to translate " a man." a De Incarnatione, xviii, i.

3 Ibid., xxj, 7.

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CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

ignorance but with knowledge did He ask. . . .
And thus with ease is their clever point exploded ;
but if they still persist on account of His asking,
then they must be told that in the Godhead
indeed ignorance is not, but to the flesh ignorance
is proper, as has been said." 1

(3) It is the same with the ignorance about the
day and the hour.

" He knows Himself what through Him has been
determined." 2

" But for them, when they thus blaspheme the
Spirit, they must expect no remission ever of such
irreligion, as the Lord has said ; but let us, who
love Christ and bear Christ within us, know that
the Word, not as ignorant, considered as Word,
has said, ' I know not/ for He knows, but as
showing His manhood, in that to be ignorant is
proper to man, and that He had put on flesh that
was ignorant, being in which, He said according
to the flesh, ' I know not.' " 3

" For as, on becoming man, He hungers and
thirsts and suffers 4 with men, so with men, as man
He knows not ; though divinely, being in the
Father Word and Wisdom, He knows, and there
is nothing which He knows not." 5

"For us, therefore, He said, ' No, not the Son
knoweth ' ; and neither was He untrue in thus
saying (for He said humanly, as man, ' I know
not '), nor did He suffer the disciples to force
Him to speak, for by saying, ' I know not/ He
stopped their enquiries." 6

1 Or. contra Arianos, III, 37. 2 Ibid., 44. 3 Ibid., 45.

*By "hunger," "thirst," "suffering," he apparently means that His
body submitted to physiological processes which in ordinary men are
accompanied by sensations of pain.

* Or. contra Arianos, III, 46. 6 Ibid., 48.

8 9

GOD AND MAN

It is pretty clear 1 to me that what Athanasius
really thought was that the Mind of Jesus, i,e. God
the Word, knew, all the tune He was speaking, when
the Day of Judgment would be ; but since ignorance
is a property of the flesh and He had assumed that
flesh, it was right that He should pretend to be
ignorant. He was acting a part ; He had taken
upon Hmi the role of man : and therefore He said,
" I know not," when really He knew. It is utterly
impossible that Athanasius should have discussed
this problem of the limitation of knowledge in the
Incarnate without betraying his belief that there was
a conscious human soul in Christ, if he had held any
such notion.

It has been contended that the word " flesh "
merely means human nature in general. It is true
that Athanasius sometimes expressly explains that
flesh means " the man " or " the race of man." 2
But sometimes he uses the term " body," which can
hardly thus be explained away. Thus, in the same
treatise, he explains St. Luke's statement that our
Lord " increased in wisdom and stature " by saying
that the advance (Prokope) belonged wholly to the
body :

" Of the body then is the advance ; for it advanc-
ing, in it advanced the manifestation of the
Godhead to those who saw it." 3

It may be suggested that he is here speaking of the
advance in stature, but the argument requires that
it should apply to both stature and wisdom. In the
sentence before he has said that " ages belong to
body." Therefore there was never in Christ a mind
that was young.

1 Of course I do not deny that much ambiguous language is used (e.g.
in Chapter xxxxvi), some of which would prima facie be inconsistent with
my interpretation, but it is reasonable to interpret ambiguous passages in
the light of those which are clearer, unless we are prepared to admit
hopeless inconsistencies within the limits of two or three chapters.

2 Or. contra Arianos, III, 30. 3 Ibid., Ill, 52.

go

CHRISTOLOGY OF S'T. ATHANASIUS

Clearly there is here present to the mind of
Athanasius only two alternatives : the advance
must belong to the Logos or to the body : it cannot
belong to the Logos : therefore it must belong,
wholly and exclusively, to the body. So in the later
Letters to Serapion :

" For since He has become man as it is written,
and to be ignorant belongs to men, as also to
hunger and to thirst and the rest (for men do not
know unless they hear and learn), therefore also
as having become man He exhibits also the
ignorance of men : He does so first, in order that
He may show that He truly has a human body ;
and secondly, that also, having the ignorance of
man in the body, having ransomed and cleansed
it from all pollution, He may present the manhood
complete and holy to the Father." 1

Here, then, is the same assumption that in Jesus
Christ there were two elements, and two only, viz.
the Logos which was divine, and a body which was
human ; and even the body ceased eventually to
be human, since by the indwelling of the Word, it
was actually by degrees converted into the divine
substance.

" The manhood (lit. not that which was divine)
advanced in Wisdom, transcending by degrees
human nature, and being deified, and becoming
and appearing to all as the organ of Wisdom for
the operation and the shining forth of the God-
head." 2

It is true that at a later date at the Council of
Alexandria over which he presided in 362 when
the question of Christ's human soul for the first time
became explicitly a subject of controversy, Athana-
sius made an attempt to reconcile the disputants,.

1 II, 9 ; Migne, P.G.. xxvi, 624. z Or. contra Arianos, III, 53.

GODANDMAN

and concedes formally the fact of the human soul
merely on the ground that, if there was no human
soul in Christ, the whole man would not be redeemed. 1
But after all it is doubtful whether this concession
seriously altered his way of looking at the whole
matter. The letter is written in the name of the
Council, other Bishops being mentioned by name as
well as Athanasius. It may be that he recognised
the soul as present in the body, and no doubt as
deified with the body, in much the same metaphysical
(i.e. illusory) sense as that in which he had earlier
thought of ignorance as being present " in the flesh "
at the very moment when the Word was merely
pretending He knew not the day nor the hour. There
is no trace, now any more than earlier, of any
consciousness which was not purely and entirely
divine. Had he really faced all that was implied in
the admission, much of his earlier work must have
needed re-writing. In any case, his language at this
date cannot cancel the clearly contrary doctrine of
the earlier writings, nor can they throw any light
upon the " mind of the Nicene Council." So far as
Athanasius represents the mind of the Council, it is
the earlier Athanasius who does so, not the Athana-
sius who, as an old man, subscribed the decision of
the Alexandrian Council in 362. And with the mind
of the Nicene Council on the question of Christ's
human soul I am at one with most modern theo-
logians of all schools in being wholly out of sympathy ;
for this mind (if Athanasius represents it) was
Apollinarian, and was corrected by later Councils. 2

1 " They confessed also that the Saviour had not a body without a soul
nor without sense or intelligence (Nous) " (Tomus ad Antiochenos) . Much
later than that (Ep. ad Epictetum, circa 371) Athanasius still says : " Truly
our salvation is not merely apparent, nor does it extend to the body only ;
but to the whole man ; body and soul alike have truly obtained salvation
in the Word Himself." In the context he has been establishing the real
humanity of the body, but there is nothing about the soul. Cf. also Ep.
ad, Adelphium (probably belonging to the 3rd Exile). I assume that the
treatise against the Apollinarians is not genuine.

2 Harnack recognises that Athanasius, " like Arius to the time of the
Apollinarian controversy, usually thought of humanity as flesh " And he

CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

THE PROBLEM OF THE "PERSONAL IDENTITY"
OF THE LOGOS WITH JESUS

We may now ask, Has this position of Athanasius
any bearing on the question of the " personal
identity " of Jesus with the pre-existent Word ? I
think most certainly it has.

To Athanasius there would have been no great
difficulty in thinking of the historical Jesus as-
personally identical with the Son of God, had he
thought in terms of our modern " Personality " at
all, just because Christ was to him for practical
purposes simply God in a human body and nothing
else. Now, if I were to have prefixed to this dis-
cussion an enquiry about the modern concept of
Personality, I should have tried to show that
personal identity has degrees. I am the same being
as I was when I was one year old, but I am also^
different changed, and changed very considerably.
In those abnormal dislocations of the personality of
which we have heard so much of late, the element of
identity may be reduced to a vanishing point. And
therefore I will not venture to assert that a priori
the notion that the Word could be united to a human
soul without any loss of personal identity is quite
impossible. But if the conservative phrase, " still
the same person," is to be made intelligible, it would
have to be accompanied by an equally strong, or a
stronger, assertion that the identity was accompanied

adds a note : " So correctly Baur. I have not found Dorner's statement
that the presupposition of a human soul occupies the background of the
whole view of Athanasius ' of the incarnation and redemption as affecting
the totality of man ' to be supported by evidence." He thinks, however,
that Baur " goes too far when he expresses the opinion that Athanasius
designedly left the human soul of Christ out of account " (History of
Dogma, E.T. Vol. IV, p. 37). I should quite recognise that Athanasius
had never seriously thought the question out or realised its importance.
Loofs duly notes the fact that prior to the Alexandrian Council no recog-
nition of a human soul in Christ is to' be found in the earlier works of
Athanasius. Prof. Ottley acknowledges that Athanasius " regards our
Lord rather as the Logos veiled in human flesh than as the man passing
through the different stages of human probation and development ""
(Doctrine of the Incarnation, II, p. 33) .

93.

GOD AND MAN

"by difference. And this assertion would involve a
frank abandonment of the doctrine so incessantly
insisted upon by Athanasius (though not asserted by
the Nicene Creed), that after the Incarnation the
Word was " unchanged." Even on Athanasius's
premisses this conception implies a very arbitrary
and wholly unphilosophical distinction between what
something is " in it self " and in its relations to other
things. Any view of the Incarnation must acknow-
ledge that it involved a change in the relations of
God to humanity, and that is really change in God.
But on the orthodox view of the Incarnation, the
assertion that the Incarnation involved no change is
absolutely impossible. There is surely a difference
"between a Logos united with a human soul and a
Logos not so united. If there is a difference, there
must be change. The attempt to avoid this con-
sequence to make out that the personality of the
Logos was just the same after as it was before the
Incarnation, and therefore purely divine leads up
to the line of thought which was to culminate in the
doctrine asserted at Chalcedon but not contained
in the actual Canons of the Council, or reproduced in
our Articles that the Logos took upon Him " human
nature," but not a human personality, that He was
man without being a man. I pass over the difficulty
that " hypostasis," if it be interpreted to mean
" person " in our sense, must also retain its original
meaning of " substance " (most modern philosophers
who make much of human personality would not
object to calling the soul a substance), and that
therefore if the " person " of the Son is to remain
purely divine, the substantiality, i.e. the reality, of
the human soul in Christ, is absolutely denied : or
we have to admit two hypostases in Christ, which
would be Nestorianism pure and simple. All these
difficulties spring from identifying the term " hypos-
tasis " with the modern term " person."

CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

LIMITATIONS OF THE KNOWLEDGE IN CHRIST

Bishop Gore's greatest service to the cause of
progressive religious thought in England is his
express avowal of that doctrine as to the limitation
of Christ's human knowledge which has happily
never been expressly condemned, which was no
doubt tacitly assumed by the more traditional
theologians in the past, but which had seldom in
modern times been expressly avowed by any theo-
logian with a reputation for orthodoxy to lose. The
Bishop differentiates himself from liberal theologians
who hold the same doctrine by saying that he has
never denied the " inerrancy " of Christ as a teacher.
The distinction is a fine one. If Jesus thought that
.a certain psalm was written by David when it was
not written by David, He did " teach " what was
not true : or if knowing its true authorship, He yet
rspoke of it as David's, then we sacrifice His veracity
to His " inerrancy." No doubt we may say that
this matter had nothing really to do with religion,
that such a limitation was not inconsistent with His
mission as the Revealer of God, and so He was
inerrant as a religious teacher : but I should say the
same as regards His belief in diabolic " possession."
I do not see, indeed, how any a priori theory could
prove " inerrancy " as distinct from actual freedom
from error. All Christian believers will assert that
Christ was free from error within certain limits, in
certain matters ; the question is about the actual
limits of His knowledge. And this can only be
.ascertained by experience. However, this is beside
-our present point. At all events Bishop Gore admits
the limitation of knowledge very frankly.

And this limitation was very extensive. Accord-
ing to Bishop Gore the Word up to the moment of
the Incarnation knew everything all history, all
.modern science, all the undiscovered science that
there is to know, the whole course of future history,

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GOD AND MAN

so far at least as it is known even to God the Father, 1
but from the moment of the Incarnation He knew
all this no more for some thirty-three years. Now, it
is surely a difficult doctrine to maintain that such a
colossal loss of memory, such a profound change of
intellectual outlook, such a complete breach of
continuity in the consciousness of the Son, was
consistent with what we commonly call personal
identity. For a tune at least, during His infancy.
He knew very little indeed.

" He grew so truly as a human child that Joseph
and His mother had not been led to expect from
Him conduct incompatible with childhood, when
they took Hun up with them to the temple in His
thirteenth year." 2

This would apparently reduce His knowledge as an
infant to almost no knowledge at all, and even
throughout life would deny to Him most of the
knowledge possessed by the highly-educated Greeks
of His own time, almost all historical knowledge, all
knowledge of modern science still more the enor-
mous mass of at present undiscovered science. Such
an admission is hardly consistent with the preserva-
tion of personal identity. Certainly it is ridiculous
to say that it is consistent with the Word being
" unchanged."

Consider what this really means. There can be no
doubt that in the view of Athanasius, if the incarnate
Word had ceased to be Omniscient and Omnipotent,
He would have ceased to be God. The admission of
ignorance in the incarnate Word was the very worst
of the Arian offences ; ignorance belongs to a created
being : the Word was not created and could not be

1 Bishop Gore pushes his doctrine of indeterminist Free-will to the point
of denying even to the Father complete knowledge of the future, with the
reservation that the two beliefs are incompatible " according to any-
standard of thinking possible to us in our present state " (Belief in God f
p. 126).

8 Gore, Dissertations, p. 77.

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CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

ignorant. An ignorant mind and an all-knowing
mind would have been for Athanasius two minds,
not one mind.

Bishop Gore does not, as some advocates of
" Kenotic " theories do, fall back upon the expedient
of limiting the ignorance to our Lord's human con-
sciousness, while holding that the divine Word re-
tained His Omniscience : this, he sees, would involve
a double consciousness which must end in something
like Nestorianism. He deliberately holds that, when
and so far as the Incarnate betrayed ignorance during
His human life,

" The Son Himself, as He reveals Himself to men
in manhood, did not know." x

It would seem that either the Universe was for some
thirty-three years carried on without the co-operation
of God the Word (for to administer the . Universe
would surely have required a knowledge which Jesus
of Nazareth did not possess) : or that there was still
a consciousness of the Word which somehow retained
the Divine knowledge, while the same Word as
incarnate in Jesus was ignorant of many things.
There can be no doubt which alternative Bishop Gore
means to adopt. The words imply, and Bishop Gore
has elsewhere told us very distinctly, that the Word
in His " Cosmic functions " did not lay aside the
divine knowledge which the government of a world
implies.

" If we are asked the question : Can the functions
of the Son in the Godhead and in the universe have
been suspended by the Incarnation ? We cannot
but answer with the theologians of the Church,
from Irenaeus to Dr. Westcott, that it is to us
inconceivable. Nor can we dissociate the fulfil-
ment of these functions from the exercise of
omniscience." 2

1 Gore, Dissertations, p. 97. 2 Ibid., p. 93.

G 97

GOD AND MAN

The Bishop, for himself, holds

" that the real Kenosis within the sphere of the
Incarnation must be held compatible with the
exercise of divine functions in another sphere." 1

This distinction of " spheres " seems to cover an
ambiguity. It seems to admit that, besides the
limited and partially ignorant consciousness, there
was an omniscient consciousness which was ruling
and governing the world and that would practically
involve the admission of four distinct consciousnesses,
i.e. four Persons, in the Holy Trinity at one and the
*:same tune. To say that one and the same Person
could be at one and the same time Omniscient in
one sphere and of extremely limited knowledge in
-another seems to me to be to use words without
meaning. At all events to say that a single personal
consciousness could at a given moment in history
split up into two such dissimilar consciousnesses
" without change " is a difficult assertion.

But of one thing I am quite certain that, on any
interpretation of his views, Bishop Gore is poles
.asunder from the thought of Athanasius and of the
Council of Nicene so far as Athanasius can be sup-
posed to represent the " mind " of that Council.
Whatever exactly Athanasius meant by attributing
ignorance to the flesh of Jesus, he would assuredly
never have admitted that " the Word was ignorant."
The suggestion that in one sphere the Word was
ignorant while in another sphere He was still the
Wisdom that rules the Universe, would have in-
volved for him just such a separation between
Father and Son, and such a catastrophic change in
Deity, as he wished above all things to avoid. So
far as he thought in modern terms of " personality "
at all, he would have protested with all his soul
against the notion that the omniscient Son, through
whom the Father rules the world, could have become

1 Gore, Dissertations, p. 105.

9 8

CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

a child's mind of extremely limited knowledge and
that without suffering any loss of personal identity
or, indeed, any change at all. By " Godhead "
Athanasius primarily meant the possession and the
exercise of all the attributes which could be applied
to God the Father, especially Omnipotence and
Omniscience (goodness is with Athanasius in his
metaphysical moments a secondary matter, for this
could admittedly be possessed by a created being).
The surrender or even the temporary non-exercise of
those attributes would have certainly meant to him
such a revolution in the very being of the Son as
could not possibly be described as involving no loss
of personal identity and no " change."

Perhaps I may be criticised on the ground that
the problem is insoluble by the human intellect.
But surely it is unreasonable first to compel us to
accept all the consequences which human logic I
feel tempted to say very human logic draws from
the available data, data chiefly supplied by doubtful
interpretations of irrelevant passages in the Old
Testament, together with assumptions about the
inspiration of Scripture and the authority of the
Church for which no evidence is offered, and inter-
pretations almost equally strained of doubtful sayings
of our Lord ; and then, when the reasoning leads to
conclusions which to human logic are self-contra-
dictory or absurd, to cry off and protest the limita-
tions of our faculties. Surely it would be a more
modest and a more reasonable course to suspect that
something must be wrong with the premisses which
lead us to such an impasse. And here, once more, let
it be understood, it is not the Nicene Creed or any
other document of the early Church which has landed
us in these difficulties, but the assumption that the
Persons of the Holy Trinity are " Persons " in the
modern sense, and that the identity between the
pre-existent Word and Jesus Christ is what the
modern world would call " personal identity." The

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GOD AND MAN

Nicene Creed does not involve such a doctrine.
I believe that there is nothing in my view of
Christ's Person which is not compatible with a full
acceptance of the Catholic doctrine of the Divinity
of Christ as denned by the Creed and the Councils.
I will at present confine myself to the Nicene Creed,
and Council. And in this case the question will
mainly turn upon what we understand by the
famous Homo-ousion. If the Word of God is (as
Athanasius maintained) the Wisdom of God, I see no*
difficulty in accepting the statement that the Wisdom
of God is " of one substance " with the Father : the
Wisdom of God is certainly as divine and as eternal
as God Himself. Further, I believe that this Wisdom
of God was revealed in or was united to Jesus Christ
in an exceptional, supreme, and unique sense.
Athanasius's habitual illustration of what is meant by
" Homo-ousion " is that a son is of the same sub-
stance with his father. Most assuredly I believe that
there is a certain community of nature between God
and Jesus. And I do not think so the less because
I also recognise that there is a real community of
nature between God and humanity at large. The
mind of man is not merely a created thing, but also
reproduces in some measure the divine intellect and
the divine power or will, and (in some cases at least)
the divine goodness, the divine love. There is
nothing about this in the Creed ; but there is.
nothing in it which forbids me to hold this, and there
is much in the teaching of some of the Greek Fathers
much in Athanasius, much more in Origen which
encourages me to do so. Origen certainly held that
the Word of God was united with men in many souls
in varying degrees, but that in Jesus this union was.
far more complete. Athanasius very distinctly
recognises that the Word was " in the prophets." *
The community of nature which receives its most
complete development in Jesus consists partly in the

iEp. ad Serapion, I, 31 ; Migne, P.G., XXVI, 601.
IOO

CHRISTOLOGY OF ST. ATHANASIUS

reproduction of the divine thought, but most com-
pletely in the perfection of His character. I believe
(here without the support of Athanasius but with
that of Bishop Gore) that this incarnation of God
involved a laying aside of the divine Omnipotence
and of much of the divine knowledge, but it carried
with it a unique communication of the kind of
knowledge which was necessary to enable Jesus to
perform the task of completely revealing God to
man, and above all the reproduction in Him of the
divine character. Such a conception of the relation
of Christ to God gives a perfectly real and important
meaning to the clauses of the Creed which assert that
Christ was " of one substance with the Father, God
from God, very God from very God." And this
interpretation involves no difficulty about the " cos-
mic functions " of the Word for those who do not
look upon the Word as a consciousness or personality
(in the modern sense) distinct from the consciousness
or personality of God the Father. No doubt the
phrases of the Creed are not those which a modern
thinker would most naturally choose. We do not in
modern philosophy talk much about a divine Ousia
and a human Ousia. We should be more disposed
to say, if we had to construct a creed Ae novo, " Jesus
Christ is the supreme Revealer of God : Christ is
God revealed in humanity." But, allowing for the
obsoleteness of the terminology, I do not find it at
all an unnatural thing to say that the Wisdom of
God received the fullest incarnation in Jesus, and
that Jesus, so far as He shares and reproduces the
divine nature (and that in a unique manner), is of
one substance with God the Father, while, so far as
He is man, He is of one substance with other men.
There is nothing in the Creed which compels me to
say that the Wisdom of God was a person (in the
modern sense) separate from the person of the Father
before the Incarnation, or that He continued to be
ihe same person after the Incarnation.

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GOD AND MAN

There is one point more. In spite of my distinct
acceptance of the Nicene definition, my opponents
sometimes assert that I look upon Jesus Christ as a
created Being. I do hold that the human body and
soul of Christ were created. The Word or Wisdom
of God who was united to that soul was not created.
Most certainly I do not believe that God at a point
of time created His own Wisdom. My answer is-
exactly the answer which Athanasius himself would
have given, except that in his earlier years, at all
events, he would have said nothing about the created
soul. I do not contend that the meaning which I
attach to the Nicene Creed is precisely the meaning
which Athanasius or any other Father of Nicaea
attached to it. I do not believe that any enlightened
modern thinker so understands it. But I do contend
that as regards the relation between the Eternal
Word and the Father before the Incarnation, my
understanding of it is nearer to that of Athanasius
than that of some modern writers. Athanasius did
not believe that the Son before the Incarnation was
a distinct consciousness from the Father : whereas
they apparently do. Athanasius was still further
from Arianism than they are. And as regards the
personal identity of Jesus with God the Word, I
differ from Athanasius just because I take very
seriously all that the Church has taught about the
true human soul of Jesus.

102

IV

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE FROM ST. ATHANA-
SIUS TO ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 1

To most modern students of Church history nothing
is more evident than that what is now considered
the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the
Divinity of Christ is the result of a long and slow
evolution. However strongly it may be maintained
that the developed doctrine is the logical result of
what went before, however superior in philosophical
truth and internal consistency the developed doc-
trine may be, most modern scholars have accepted
the general fact of development of a real develop-
ment of thought as distinct from a mere increased
technicality and precision of language. But Bishop
Gore, like the Roman Catholic theologians who
attacked Newman's doctrine, believes that the
Church has

" throughout taught, explicitly or almost explicit-
ly, exactly the same doctrine from the days of the
Apostles to Nicaea, and from Nicaea to the last
General Council or beyond it."

The apostles, he seems to think, had in their minds
all that is asserted in the decrees of Chalcedon or in
the Athanasian Creed ; only they had not at present
hit upon the language appropriate to the expression
of their thoughts. He tells us :

" The dogmatic product is something more than
the survival of the fittest formulas. It represents
simply and faithfully, in language supplied by the
Greek philosophical schools, the original Apostolic
Creed in Christ the Incarnate Son of God." 2

The variety of senses in which such an expression as
" incarnate Son of God " may be taken, and has

1 Reprinted, with considerable modifications, from the Modern Church-
man, Vol. XII, pp. 196-213 (July, 1922).
z Bampton Lectures, Ed. I, p. 89.

103

GOD AND MAN

"been taken, whether we think of the early heresies or
of the orthodox Fathers, Schoolmen or modern
Theologians, seems altogether to escape some modern
divines.

There is another truth which might have been
supposed to be since the days (let us say) of Blanco
White and Bishop Hampden pretty generally ad-
mitted ; and that is the fact that the established
doctrine of the Church has been evolved very largely
by a fusion of the original ideas of Christianity with
the ideas and doctrines of Greek philosophy. Yet
even this is denied.

" What the Church then borrowed from Greek
thought was her terminology, not the substance
of her creed." 1

Now to suppose that we can thus sharply separate
between thought and terminology that the thought
of an individual or of a school can remain entirely
unaffected by the adoption of a wholly new termin-
ology is impossible. New words necessarily bring
with them new meanings, suggestions, associations.
Moreover, words especially in the region of philo-
sophical thought are always changing their mean-
ing, and the changes are either caused by or they
cause a change in men's thoughts. It would be
absurd to say that it was merely a new term or a
new use of an old term which came into the world
when Socrates or Plato began to teach the doctrine
of " ideas." It is equally absurd to suppose that,
when men who had previously not used the word
" substance," or any possible Aramaic equivalent of
it, began to discuss whether the Son was of one
substance with the Father, or of like substance or of
unlike substance, those who accepted the orthodox
view are really only thinking the thoughts of St.
Mark or St. Paul, or even those of the Fourth

1 Gore, Hampton Lectures, Ed. I, p. 101. He afterwards makes a certain,
exception as to the use of the term Hypostasis, but apparently without
seeing how much is implied in the exception.

IO4

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

Evangelist. Obviously the men who discussed such
questions were facing new problems. And conse-
quently were thinking new thoughts, whatever was
the answer they gave to them. One answer may
have been more continuous, more harmonious, more
consistent with the earlier tradition than another :
but assuredly it was not the same thought.

And there is another assumption which conser-
vative scholars sometimes make. They assume that
the meaning of those terms, which are admittedly
borrowed from Greek philosophy, is something
perfectly simple and unmistakable, and (apparently)
always the same.

" The ideas of substance or thing, of personality,
of nature, are permanent ideas ; we cannot get
rid of them ; no better words could be suggested
to express the same facts." 1

To suppose that even these terms (and he carefully
selects the less technical in the elaborate vocabulary
of dogma) whether we think of the English words
or their Greek equivalents have been always used
with the same meaning, is a strange contention for
anyone even a little acquainted with the history of
human thought.

It is interesting in this connexion to study the
history of the words Ousia and Hypostasis. The
two terms in ordinary usage meant practically the
same thing. In the Nicene anathemas, as in the
writings of Athanasius, the words are used as
equivalents, and they are used to express the unity
of the Godhead : Father and Son were of the same
ousia or hypostasis. In Athanasius's earlier days the
doctrine of two hypostases or three was a character-
istically, if not exclusively, Arian mode of expression.
Gradually a change in the use of these terms came

1 Bampton Lectures, p, 105. In a recent utterance (the Deity of Christ,
p. 70) he admits that "the theory, the theology of the Church," we owe
to the Greeks. Surely this is something more than " terminology."

105

GOD AND MAN

about. At the Synod of Alexandria (362 A.D.),
presided over by Athanasius himself in his old age,
it was settled that, while there was certainly only one
Ousia in the Godhead, the use of the term Hypostasis
to denote either Father or Son was allowable, while the
older use of the term as the equivalent of Ousia was
still permitted. Now such a change of terminology
was scarcely possible without a corresponding change
of thought whether the change of terminology was
the cause or the effect of such an intellectual change.
It is pretty obvious that, when men who had been
taught to think of the Son as of one hypostasis with
the Father and to reject with indignation the notion
of two or three hypostases, came to apply to Father
and Son separately the very word which they had
hitherto used to denote their unity, this must have
implied a movement of thought towards an increased
emphasis on the separateness and a diminished
emphasis upon the unity. And this is exactly what
critical students of dogmatic history tell us was the
case.

One of the great puzzles of early Church history is
to understand (i) the sudden abandonment of the
Nicene formula by the greater part of the Christian
world after the almost universal acceptance of it at
the Council : (2) the eventual triumph of the Nicene
formula. Professor Harnack and others have taught
us to understand the meaning of the change. The
Athanasian ideas went far beyond the commonly
accepted ideas on the subject. Athanasius was at
least as much an innovator as Arms, or more so.
The usually accepted ideas in the pre-Nicene period
(outside Sabellian circles) were, if not Arian, at least
nearer to Arianism than they were to Athanasianism.
Justin and others called the Son frankly a " second "
or " another " God. A new development was
urgently called for, if the Church was not to lapse
into sheer Polytheism. The " higher " the Arianism
might be, the greater the measure or the kind of

106

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

divinity ascribed to the Son, if He was not to be
regarded as sharing the very same Godhead as the
Father, the greater was the danger of His being
thought of as one of a triad of three distinct Deities.
The true glory of Athanasius is that he saved the
Monotheism of the Church or at least began the
process by which Monotheism might be saved. But
to say that Athanasius was right, or at least much
nearer the truth than Arms, is not to explain how
an Arian world eventually became Athanasian or
Nicaean. When we note the change in the meaning-
of the term Hypostasis, we begin to see the inner
history of the process. We may either look upon
the change registered at the Synod of Alexandria
as a merely diplomatic or external compromise
between two really distinct modes of thought, or as
an intellectual compromise by which a tertium quid
was discovered between the sharply antagonistic
positions. It was probably both. There was a
coming together of the moderate men of both parties
a practical desire for outward unity and also a
disposition towards intellectual conciliation. The
excesses of the extreme or Anomoean Arians which
began by saying that Christ was of unlike substance
to the Father and ended by making Him " a mere
man " created a reaction against Arianism in general :
and there was a corresponding disposition on the
part of the Athanasians to put the best construction
upon the language used by the Conservatives or
moderate Arians. The compromise took this form.
The term Hypostasis came to be understood as
expressing the distinctions in the Godhead at first
side by side with the older phraseology but eventually
to its practical exclusion ; while the Arians gave up
the three Ousiai and agreed that there was only one
Ousia in the Godhead. On the other hand the
Arians agreed to adopt the Nicaean formula, Homo-
ousion, but they practically explained it in a sense
approximating to the moderate Arian Homoi-ousion.

107

GOD AND MAN

Athanasius himself consented to explain " of one
Hypostasis with the Father/' by the words " like in
all things " to the Father. The group of theologians
through whose influence this compromise was effected
was what is now known as the Cappadocian School,
of which the chief members are Basil, Gregory of
Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen. 1

My object in calling attention to these facts is to
bring out the great variety of thought which may be
covered by a common acceptance of such phrases as
the Homo-ousion or the three Hypostases. Now I
Tiave insisted in the preceding paper 2 that Athanasius
does not use the word Personality or any Greek term
which can fairly be regarded as its equivalent. If
you maintain that Hypostasis, which was eventually
accepted as the theological equivalent of the Latin
Persona, really means the same thing as the modern
English " Person," then we must say that Athanasius
explicitly denied that Father and Son were distinct
Persons : for he held that there was only one
hypostasis of Father and Son. Without saying that
his language is either perfectly consistent or perfectly
intelligible, his conception of the Unity of the God-
head is much stronger than what some modern
writers regard as essential to orthodoxy ; he makes
the Father and the pre-incarnate Son far less distinct
than they do. It is quite clear that he was no
Tritheist.

When, however, we turn to the Cappadocians,

1 This view, which is supported by Zahn and Gwatkin as well as Har-
nack, has been vigorously combated by Prof. Bethune-Baker in a learned
article (Texts and Studies, ed. Robinson, Vol. VII, No. i). But the pas-
.sages quoted by him from the three Cappadocian Fathers seem to me to
prove the opposite of what he intends. They seem to me to show clearly
that these writers did, as Athanasius did not, habitually think of the Three
on the analogy of three human individuals, though they undoubtedly try to
balance the obvious Tritheism of the comparison by distinctions and strong
assertions of the Unity. It will be observed that I have avoided the
assertion that their position is actually identical with that of the Homoious-
ian Arians, but it seems to me quite clear that they follow them in asserting
a much stronger separation between Father and Son than Athanasius had
done.

2 " The Christology of St. Athanasius."

108

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

with their three Hypostases, there indeed we do-
encounter a mode of thinking and speaking about the
Trinity very similar to the mode of speaking and
thinking which is now commonly accepted as ortho-
dox, but which Athanasius, at least in his earlier
days, would have been disposed to treat as savouring
of Homoi-ousian Arianism or of positive Tritheism.
At the very least, these men emphasised the three-
ness rather than the oneness.

" Starting as they did, from the three-ness in
the Divine, with the unity as a mysterious prob-
lem, it was particularly difficult for the Cappa-
docians to avoid the semblance of Tritheism, and
this was an accusation long current in the West." x

It is chiefly upon this compromise between
Athanasianism and Arianism, if I am not mistaken,
that the theology of some conservative present-day
theologians is built up. In many ways these
Fathers are worthy of. the highest respect. Would
that the popular orthodoxy of the day were as
philosophical and as liberal as the teaching of the
two Gregories ! But their weakest point is their
approximation to Tritheism, in spite of their formal
repudiation of it. a

Whatever may be thought of the Cappadocian
compromise in the West, just because its faith was-
simpler and less subtle, the attachment to Mono-
theism was much stronger. I have attempted to

1 H. R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, ed. iii, p. 194.

3 Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxix, 12 (cf. Ottley, Doctrine of the Incarnation, II,
pp. 45-7). So Dorner says of Basil : " It we ask . . . whether when he
speaks of hypostasis, he means a person in the sense in which we use the
term of men, we must answer, ' No.' " (Doctrine of the Person of Christ,
E.T., Div. I, Vol. II, 1862, Third Epoch, ch. iii, p. 310.) It is true that
Bishop Gore writes : " The three Persons are not separable individuals, so
that it could be argued that what one of the sacred three does another does
not do, as we commonly argue about persons among ourselves, recognising
each person as separate and exclusive of others " (Bampton Lectures, p. 133).
This statement no doubt satisfies the requirements of conventional ortho-
doxy, but it does not alter the impression that he habitually thinks of the
three Persons as three quite distinct consciousnesses always co-operating
with each other.

GOD AND MAN

show that even for Athanasius the Second Person in
the Godhead was not thought of as a distinct Person
from the Father in anything like the ordinary
modern sense in which Bishop Gore and his friends
appear to take it. Still more decidedly is this the
case when we turn to St. Augustine and the School-
men whose theology was built up upon his. In
examining the teaching of St. Augustine on this
subject, it must be remembered that his treatise on
the Holy Trinity is the source of what has always
been accounted in the West the orthodox doctrine on
the subject. The so-called Athanasian Creed is
simply a bald and bad epitome of that work bad
because everything which tends to explain the
doctrine and make it intelligible is left out.

Now, in spite of assertions to the contrary, I
maintain that it is quite clear that for St. Augustine
the Son was not thought of as a distinct person from
the Father in anything approaching the modern
sense. He repeats and enlarges the physical anal-
ogies which help us so little when we have to do with
the phenomena of Mind the fountain and the
stream, the light and the brightness or the whiteness,
and so on. But the analogy upon which he most
strongly insists is the relation between different
aspects or activities of the human mind. Never
does he compare the relations between the Persons
of the Trinity to the relations between two human
Tseings or two members of any other species of
conscious beings. The Trinity is always likened to
the relation between different activities of one and
the same divine Mind. That God is one Mind (una
mens) is with him a fundamental truth. The human
activities within the one consciousness in the light in
which he understands the Trinity are not always the
same. The Father is sometimes Principium (the
" source of Godhead," 771777) 6e6rrjTos, though this
term is also applicable to the Son in virtue of the
double procession) ; sometimes He is Memory ;

no

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

sometimes Mind (Mens) in general. The Son is the
Wisdom of the Father or His knowledge (sapientia)
or His intelligence (intelligentia) , the knowledge by
which He knows Himself; and sometimes (be it
added) created beings are in some sense included in
the being of the Word. 1 The Holy Spirit is the
Love by which the Father is loved by the Son and
the Son by the Father. In other passages He is the
Will (voluntas) of God. Since the Will of God is
always a loving Will, there is no essential discrepancy
between the two formulae. How little he thinks of
the three Persons as three distinct minds is most
conspicuously shown by his doctrine that the love of
the Father for the Son is the Holy Spirit. 2 The love
of one entity for another cannot possibly be thought
of as a person in the modern sense, and then (be it
remembered) that the Son whom the Father loves
and knows is for St. Augustine simply God Himself.
The Son is not only God's subjective thinking, but
also the object of His thought, just as when a human
subject knows himself, the object of his knowledge is
in a sense distinguished from the knowing self, and
is yet at the same time that very self.

That there are passages inconsistent with this
interpretation to be found in St. Augustine I do not
deny. Much more even than St. Athanasius, he
was bound by authorities which he could not dis-
regard, authorities in which the Son was, or seemed
to be treated as, a distinct Mind. He was full of the
idea that the Trinity was, strictly speaking, incom-
prehensible to mortal minds. He is full of incon-
sistencies and full of unintelligibilities. 3 He did not

1 " Hoc loco (i.e. In principle trot Verbum, Jn. I, i) melius verbum
interpretamur, ut significetur non solum ad Patrem respectus sed ad ilia
etiam quae per Verbum facta sunt operativa potentia." De Diversis
jQuaest. LXXXIII, q. 63 ; Migne, P.L., xl, 54.

2 " Spiritus quoque sanctus ... sit summa charitas utrumque conjungens
nosque subjungens." De Trin. VII, c. iii, 6.

a See especially De Trin. XV, c. vii, 12, where he says : Quis audeat
dicere, Patrem nee se ipsum, nee Filium, nee Spiritum sanctum intelligere
nisi per Filium, vel diligere nisi per Spiritum sanctum, thus admitting two
knowledges within the Trinity, which is inconsistent with his whole posi-
tion. Athanasius had said the very thing of which Augustine exclaims,
*Quis audeat dicert ? Ill

GOD AND. MAN

profess to make the doctrine completely intelligible.
But he does try to make it reasonable ; and, so far
as he does so, he always thinks of God as a Being
whose distinct activities as much constitute One
Mind or Consciousness as Memory, Wisdom, and
Love in a human being not as three beings who are
united by the closeness of their intercourse and their
agreement to adopt the same policy in their govern-
ment of the world after the fashion of the Arian
Milton or our modern orthodox Tritheists. . Man is.
the imago Trinitatis one Mind, not three minds. 1
The " Una Mens " in God, the union of the three
activities, is even closer than in the human mind :
for in the human mind these distinguishable activi-
ties, though not three conscious beings, are, indeed,
according to him, three things : in the Divine Mind
they are only one thing which is called by all three-
names. 2

In the Schoolmen the inconsistencies, the un-
certainties, the mysticism of St. Augustine largely
disappear. St. Augustine is reduced to a clear-cut
doctrine, and here the fact that Persona is used in
the most technical of senses positively leaps to the
eyes. The first thinker who attempted to put what
was, after all, only St. Augustine's doctrine into a
quite definite and rational form was Abelard, the^
true founder of the scholastic theology : for him God
is Power, Wisdom, and Love or Will. The clearness-
and lucidity with which the doctrine was expressed
by Abelard exposed the unfortunate man to a furious
persecution at the hands of ignorant ecclesiastics
hounded on by the arch-persecutor, St. Bernard.
By one Council he was condemned for Sabellianism :

1 Bishop Gore always seems to avoid the admission of " One Mind."
He says, indeed, that " In God then, we imagine^ is a perfect and eternal,
life, of will and reason and love " : but from the context it would appear
that the " life " is thought of in the singular merely as we speak of many
human beings sharing the same " social life."

2 " Nee distent in eis ista, sicut in nobis aliud est memoria, aliud est
intelligentia, aliud dilectio sive charitas : sed unum aliquid sit quod omnia-
valeat, sicut ipsa sapientia " (XV, c. xvii, 28). Of course there are dis-
tinctions which save him from actual Sabellianism.

112

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

by another for Arianism. But for all that the
Trinitarian doctrine which he formulated was sub-
stantially the same as that which, in the hands of
his successors, became the orthodox doctrine of the
Western Churches. The Sentences of Abelard's dis-
ciple, Peter the Lombard, became the official text-
book of theology taught in all the mediaeval
Universities. For the Master of the Sentences, as for
Abelard, the Father is Power, the Son Wisdom, the
Holy Ghost Love or Will. In St. Thomas Aquinas
the Triad is the same, except that he substitutes
Augustine's term Principium for Potentia, but
explains that word as " the power of generating the
Son." For Aquinas, as for St. Augustine, the Son is
the knowledge by which God knows Himself , and the
Holy Spirit is the love by which God loves Himself.

The best way in which I can convince my readers
that there is no trace in St. Thomas of the three-mind
view of the Godhead, will be to translate literally a
few passages from the famous Summa.

First of all as to the meaning of the term Person
and the relations between the Persons. St. Thomas
thus explains the " processions " of the Divine
Persons, i.e. the generatio of the Son (which is also a
processio), and the processio of the Holy Spirit.

(i) " We must not understand ' procession ' in
the sense in which the term is used in corporal
things or in connexion with motion in space, or
with the action of any cause to produce an exterior
effect, as warmth proceeds from the thing that
heats into the thing heated : but in the sense of an
intelligible emanation, as, for instance, the intel-
ligible word (or concept) proceeds from a speaker
while remaining at the same tune in him." 1

The relation of Father to Son is the relation of a

1 Summa Theol., I, Q. xxvii, Art. i. Compare the words in the same
article : " Whoever understands, from the very fact that he understands,
there proceeds something within him which is the conception of the thing
understood coming forth from intellectual force and proceeding from his
knowledge." II "2

H

GOD AND MAN

thinker or a speaker to his thought. This has not the
least resemblance to the relation between two human
"beings ; the speaker or thinker is not one conscious-
ness, and the spoken word or concept another con-
sciousness.

(2) " By which name (i.e. Holy Spirit) is desig-
nated a certain vital motion and impulsion ; as a
man is said to be moved or impelled by love to do
something." 1

How can the love which impels a man to do any-
thing be thought of as a separate consciousness from
the man ?

(3) " The processions in the divine region (in
divinis) follow immanent actions which in an
intelligible and divine nature are only two, to
understand and to will, which are precisely the
processions, in the divine region, of the Word and
of Love " s

What can be plainer ? The Word is a name for
God's thinking, including the object of His thought,
which is also Himself, and includes in a sense poten-
tially or actually all that He creates.

(4) Again : " The term Word is applied in a
special sense (proprie) to God, in a sense according
to which the Word signifies the conception of the
Intellect." 3

(5) " It must be said that in the Word there is
implied a respect to the creature. For God, in
knowing himself, knows every created being. The
word therefore conceived in the mind is repre-
sentative of anything that is actually understood.
Whence in us there are divers words, according as
the things understood are divers. But because

1 Summa Theol., Q. xxvii, Art. 4. " Ibid., Q. xxvii, Art. 5.

8 Ibid., Q. xxxiv. Art. i.

114

TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

God understands both Himself and all things in
one act, His one and only (unicum) Word is
expressive not only of the Father, but also of the
creatures." 1

Here the Word means the world, as it is thought of
"by God, and is therefore not a person in the modern
sense. 2

(6) " The Son proceeds by way of intellect, as
the Word : but the Holy Spirit by way of Will, as
Love. But it is necessary that Love should pro-
ceed from the Word ; for we do not love anything
except what we conceive in our minds." 3

Whatever may be thought of this as a defence of
the Western doctrine of double procession, it shows
clearly enough that the Son (apart from the Incar-
nation) is to St. Thomas just the divine thought,
including the object which it thinks, while the Holy
Spirit is the love which God has for the object of His
thought (which is potentially all creation), and which
love is inseparable from the thinking of that object.

(7) " When therefore it is said that the Holy
Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son (in
Filium) there is not signified anything that passes
over (transiens) into another, but only a habitude
towards the thing loved ; as also in the Word there
is implied a habitude of the Word towards the
thing expressed by the Word." 4

This is rather a difficult passage. It seems to
mean that the Word represents in a sense, or con-
tains, without being actually identified with, all the
things which God was from all eternity going to

1 Summa Theol., Q. xxxiv, Art. 3.

2 It will be observed that this object of the divine thought is only
" representative of " the creatures. A more thorough-going Idealism
would have said that the created things themselves were the objects of the
divine thought.

* Summa Theol., Q. xxxvi, Art. 2. 4 Ibid., Q. xxxvii, Art. x.

GOD AND MAN

create and does at a definite moment create and
continuously conserve in time. In the same way-
God is the Holy Spirit because He eternally loves
this thought of Himself and His creation. Its object
is to guard against the suggestion that the Love,
which is the Holy Spirit, begins to exist when the
Holy Spirit puts forth the actual energy of love at a
particular moment of time. Observe the phrase,
" the thing expressed by the Word." The love with
which the Spirit is identified is not of a kind which
necessarily implies a conscious being as its object, or
a capacity for returning the love. And yet the
Holy Spirit is represented as being the love not
merely of the Father for the Son but of the Son for
the Father. 1 This is a difficult thought to grasp, and
I do not know that Thomas ever clearly explains it,,
or reconciles it with the doctrine that the Son is just
the Father's activity of thinking. It might perhaps
be explained to mean that the Word (in a sense)
includes all rational beings who have the capacity of
returning the love of God, and in that sense the
Word loves God the Father who is One Being with
Himself. Or perhaps we should be nearer St.
Thomas's thought if we suppose him to mean that
since in thinking the divine Thought the Word
necessarily loves that which He thinks, the Word
may be said to be loving the Father from whom these
thoughts proceed. At all events, be it observed, the
Holy Spirit is not a lover but love : so the
term Person does not by itself imply a distinct con-
sciousness that thinks and loves another distinct
consciousness.

Finally, St. Thomas' position is summed up in the
words :

" In rational creatures, therefore, in which there

is intellect and will, there is found a representation

1 Cf. Summa Theol., Q. xxxvi, Art. 2 (quoted above). The whole of
this Quaestio is extremely subtle. Thomas has great difficulty in.
distinguishing his position from the position illogically and inconsistently-
condemned by St. Augustine in the passage quoted above, p. in, n. 3.

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TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

of the Trinity by way of image in so far as there is
found in them a word conceived (verbum con-
ceptum, i.e. a concept) and a love that proceeds." 1

Any candid and honest reader of these passages,
even if he cannot share the added confidence which
comes from the impression produced by reading
them continuously and in their context, will, I think,
require weighty evidence to convince him that, when
writers like St. Augustine, and still more clearly St.
Thomas, speak of a Person of the Holy Trinity, they
-do not mean what we mean or anything like it. 2
They do not consider the Father and the Son as
personally distinct (in our sense) from each other or
from the Holy Spirit : nor do they think of the
pre-existing Son (after the fashion of the Allan
Milton), as beings so distinct as to be capable of
holding deliberations and conversations with one
another. When they declare that God is One Mind
(Una Mens), they really mean what they say.

When we turn from the writings of the modern
conservatives to St. Thomas Aquinas, we find, as I
have tried to show, a doctrine of the Trinity which
is perfectly rational, intelligible, and at bottom quite
simple. That God is Power, Wisdom and Love is
surely a doctrine which most genuine Theists will
.accept. It is a doctrine which might well be taught
in every Sunday School. To some it will seem an
insuperable objection that most Unitarians would

1 Summa Theol., Ibid., Q. xlv, Art. 7.

2 [Father Vincent McNabb, O.P., took part in the discussion which
this paper occasioned on its publication. His contribution will be found
reprinted in From a Friar's Cell (Oxford, Blackwell, 1923), under the title
" Bishop Gore, Dean Rashdall, and St. Thomas Aquinas." While be-
lieving that Rashdall had, in the main, correctly interpreted St. Thomas'
doctrine of the Trinity, he criticised the exclusive character of the phrase
in the text here, or anything like it. Writing in the Church Times for
February 14, 1929, p. 180, he asserted : " I had such trust in the scholarly
instincts of Dean Rashdall as to send him a copy of the article with its
correction of his mistake (i.e., the overstatement of the phrase in question).
I here put on record for the first time my sense of relief and gratitude
when I received a letter from the Dean, thanking me for pointing out the
.mistake in his statement, and adding simply that he would never make
the statement again ! "] EDD,-

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GOD AND MAN

accept it. That ought to be no objection to a.
reasonable Trinitarian. If the doctrine of the Holy-
Trinity has been so misrepresented as to become a
source of offence to so many, it ought not surely to-
be an objection to a modern restatement of it that
it would enable many Unitarians to accept it, and so-
to be Unitarians no longer. The doctrine is no
worse because it happens to be perfectly orthodox.
You cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas
Aquinas, even if in agreeing with him you have the
misfortune to disagree with some modern writers-
who have a reputation for orthodoxy.

While I contend that the actual doctrine of the
Trinity as taught by Thomas Aquinas is both simple
and rational, I think candour requires that I should
admit that there are many doctrinal statements in
St. Thomas which it is .much more difficult for a
modern philosophical thinker to translate into terms,
of intelligible modern thought. But these are
positions which the most conservative modern
Anglican, unless he is among the very few who have
thought themselves into a thoroughly scholastic
frame of mind, will find it as difficult as the Modernist
to accept or to interpret. I will take an instance.
When St. Thomas calls the three Persons Hypostases
he does not imply that they are separate conscious-
beings : the word Hypostasis has no suggestion in it
of any of the ideas commonly implied by our modern
term " person " consciousness, thought, will. But
it does suggest the idea of Substance. And he is
very anxious to establish the fact that the divine
Power, Wisdom, and Love are distinct hypostases or
substances. This was forced upon him by the weight
of the authorities which had asserted the doctrine,
and by the necessity of escaping the appearance of
Sabellianism. And yet it is the essence of his doc-
trine that the three Persons are three relations
three internal relations within the divine Mind. A
hypostasis seems to mean for him precisely a thing of

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TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

which something can be predicated, but which cannot
be predicated of anything else. If then the Son
means the relation of " Sonship " (filiatio) it would
seem that it must be a predicate of some other
thing : you cannot have a relation without terms.
To escape this difficulty, he has to fall back upon
the doctrine that in the divine nature relations are
not mere relations but are real things : in the divine
nature there is no difference between the abstract
and the concrete. I will not attempt the translation
of this doctrine into terms of modern philosophy. I
am far from saying that it cannot be done. Indeed,
it bears a strong resemblance to that doctrine that
all relation is at bottom unreal which, in Mr. Brad-
ley's hands, leads up to a conception of the Absolute
fundamentally opposed to that which St. Thomas or
any other genuinely Theistic thinker wishes to
defend. From a more philosophical point of view
there can be no difficulty in calling the divine
Wisdom a hypostasis. It is something real and
something distinguishable from the divine Power.
It is no less a reality because it is incapable of
existing apart from that Power.

I am afraid that some of my readers may already
be wearied even with the amount of metaphysical
subtlety which is involved in the scholastic doctrine
of the Trinity, even so far as I have expounded it.
They may ask whether it is really worth while to
construct an apology for formulas which seem so
remote from modern modes of thinking and speaking,
and which have so little I o do with life and godliness.
Had we not better get rid of them altogether ? I am
far from attaching high intrinsic value to the for-
mulae about the Trinity and the Incarnation which
are contained in the decrees of the General Councils
and in the Patristic and Scholastic Theologies which
have grown out of them. I believe that for practical
purposes, in our teaching and our preaching, it is a
very simple doctrine about the Person of Christ that

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GOD AND MAN

we want a doctrine which shall recognise the reality
and the supremacy of the revelation which God has
made of Himself in Christ, which shall understand
the Divinity of Christ in such a way as not to make
his humanity unreal or unintelligible, but which shall
not attempt to define the nature and mode of the
union of the divine and human in Christ in any but
the simplest way. But the fact remains that we
have got these formulae. Some of them are con-
tained in the Creeds and Confessions of Faith, in
hymns and in prayers. They are often understood
in a way which makes them unintelligible, irrational,
and a serious obstacle to vital faith in Christ and to
hearty membership in the Churches which are more
or less committed to the traditional phrases. And
those who understand the Christian doctrine in a
manner more intelligible and more natural to modern
minds, are accused of unorthodoxy ; and (if they are
clergymen) are told that, as honest men, they have
no place in the Churches which profess to be orthodox
or Catholic. These accusations have a most deter-
rent effect on possible candidates for Holy Orders.
Hence, where it is possible to show that the original
meaning of these formulae, or the meaning which
they have received at the hands of authorities in the
past whose orthodoxy cannot be disputed, is really
much more reasonable and intelligible than is com-
monly supposed, and to show that their essential
meaning is capable of being expressed in simpler and
more modern language, one is doing a useful thing.
I have tried to show that this is so to some extent
with the Trinitarian dogma as expounded by
Athanasius, still more as expounded by St. Augus-
tine, and most of all with the interpretation which
that doctrine receives in the most authoritative of
the Schoolmen. In particular I have tried to show
that the greatest cause of offence in the Trinitarian doc-
trine is no part of the orthodox dogma. What makes
the doctrine seem unreasonable and unintelligible

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TRINITARIAN DOCTRINE

to most thoughtful modern minds is the notion
that to speak of three persons in the Godhead
involves the belief that God is three distinct con-
sciousnesses, whose unity consists merely in the
closeness of their co-operation and mutual agreement.
This is the feature in the Trinitarian doctrine which
causes most difficulty, and yet which is most insisted
on by the recognised champions of orthodoxy. I
believe that this interpretation is not required even
by the most rigid orthodoxy, and that, on the
contrary, the zealots who insist upon it are them-
selves unorthodox, and go very near to the
confines of Tritheism if they do not deliberately
and ostentatiously plunge into it. 1

I do not believe that the patristic and scholastic
formulations of the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and
of the Divinity of Christ are of very much spiritual
value. Unless they are explained and translated
into more modern terms, they may even be causes
of much spiritual loss alike to those who make
much of them and to those whom their existence
prevents from reaching the very truth which they
were originally designed to assert. It is, as it seems
to me, of the utmost importance that these elaborate
technicalities should be looked upon merely as means
of expressing in terms of an obsolete terminology
and an obsolete philosophy the infinitely important
truth that God has made a full, supreme, and, in a
sense, final revelation of Himself in the historical
personality of the man Christ Jesus ; and yet that
He still goes on revealing Himself in the hearts and
consciences of men, and particularly in that Society
of Christ's followers which we call the Church. I do
not think these technicalities are very important,
even when explained ; but unexplained, they are
positively pernicious.

1 Tritheism in these days seems not to be unpopular : nobody objects
to believing too much.

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THE MORAL ARGUMENT FOR PERSONAL

IMMORTALITY

I AM going to speak of the moral argument for
Immortality. And I have chosen that line of
argument because I very much doubt whether there
is any other which does not at bottom presuppose
or involve very much the same line of thought.
Direct metaphysical proofs of immortality argu-
ments based upon the " simplicity " of the soul,
upon a supposed present independence of the body
or the like may be regarded as wholly out of date :
they all imply a view as to the relations of soul to
body which cannot now be maintained. But to
admit that there can be no direct metaphysical proof
of immortality does not mean that Metaphysic has
nothing to say to the matter far from it. On the
contrary, I believe that a reasonable man's attitude
towards the question will, in the main, be determined
by his general view of the Universe and particularly
by that vital element in his Weltanschauung which is
concerned with the status of the individual mind
in its relation to the Universe as a whole. By a
direct metaphysical argument I mean any line of
thought which tries to establish immortality without
taking into account the facts of the moral life and
the world of values. What I mean by the moral
argument for immortality is the contention that it is
impossible to construct a view of Reality which shall
do justice alike to that aspect of the Universe which
is revealed by the judgments of Science and that
aspect of it which is revealed in our moral judgments
or judgments of value without the hypothesis of
immortality for the individual soul. This implies
that any argument for immortality must start with
establishing a certain view of the ultimate nature of
things. It is obvious that in a single lecture it will
be impossible even to outline that general view of the

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

Universe which such an argument must presuppose-
In such a lecture I can but enumerate the assump-
tions which I must make. I call them assumptions
without implying that they cannot be justified by
lines of thought as valid- and as cogent as we can
ever expect to obtain for any theory as to the
ultimate constitution of Reality as a whole. Only
here I have hardly time even to hint at the lines of
argument by which they can be justified.

(1) I shall assume that the ultimate principle or
ground of the Universe is spiritual that is to say,
that it must be thought of after the analogy, ad-
mittedly imperfect as such an analogy must be, of
the only spiritual being of which we have immediate
experience that is to say, the human mind, con-
ceived of not merely as intelligence but also as
activity or will.

(2) I shall assume that the relation of the indivi-
dual human mind to the ultimate or universal Mind
is conceived of in such a way that its reality and its
activity are not wholly merged or absorbed in that
larger Mind from which its being is derived that it
is allowed to have a certain measure, not of absolute
but of relative, independence. 1 I do not mean here
to assume what is popularly known as the freedom of
the will ; but I do assume that the individual mind
is something more than a phase or appearance of the
universal Mind, and that the individual will is really
the cause of what are commonly called the actions
of the man.

(3) I assume the objective validity of our moral
judgments. This does not, of course, mean that I or
any other human being is infallible in his judgments
of value, any more than he is in his scientific or his
historical judgments. It means rather that the
concept of Oughtness, or Goodness, or Value is part
of the real nature of things that it is not a mere

1 1 may refer to Prof. Laird's recent work Problems of the Self as
containing a remarkably sane and judicial statement of this relative
independence.

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GOD AND MAN

expression of my personal wishes or desires or
idiosyncrasies, or even of the mental and emotional
-constitution of a particular species of two-legged
animals which happens to have flourished during
what Mr. Balfour has called a short and transitory
episode he might have said a discreditable episode
in the life of the meanest of the planets : and I
shall assume that even in their concrete detail we
may regard such judgments as valid, though here as
in other regions of thought not all such judgments
are equally trustworthy. Judgments of value, I
shall assume boldly, are valid for Reality. We have
just as much right to trust them, and to use them in
our construction of the ultimate nature of things, as
we have to trust any other of our judgments.

In more popular language my three assumptions
are (i) the existence of God ; (2) the reality of the
human soul as against either Materialism or any form
of thought approximating to Pantheism ; (3) the
existence and authority of Conscience.

The denials of immortality generally spring from
the denial of one or more of these positions, or at
least from insufficient appreciation of, or emphasis
upon, one or more of them when they are not
actually denied. It is clear that the idea of immor-
tality is impossible to anyone who takes a material-
istic view of the relation between mind and body.
If the soul is in any sense the mere accident or
attribute or by-product of material processes, it is
clear that its survival is out of the question. Almost
equally fatal to a real belief in immortality are all the
numerous shades of thought which tend to make of
the individual soul merely an appearance of God or
(as some thinkers would prefer to say) the Absolute,
however spiritual the being of that Absolute may be
declared to be. The most emphatic repudiation of
personal immortality on the part of philosophers of
a spiritualistic type has usually come from this side.
Spinoza in the classical period of philosophical

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thought and Mr. Bradley in modern times are the
typical exponents of this attitude, though even Mr.
Bradley's contempt for the individual hardly equals
that of the eminent thinker who is too modestly in
the habit of describing himself as a mere disciple of
Mr. Bradley. Mr. Bradley's denial of full reality to
the individual has in it a tinge of regret : Professor
Bosanquet's attitude reminds me of the workhouse
master who told a dying pauper that he ought to be-
very grateful that there was a Hell for the likes of
him to go to. Many philosophers who in other ways
are Christian enough in thought and feeling are more
or less influenced by the same line of philosophical
speculation, though in some of them this merging of
the individual in the universal mind is represented in
mystical fashion rather as a goal of future aspiration
than as something which is already a fact in the case
of the meanest, as of the most exalted, finite mind.
This line of thought is responsible for the assertion of
personal immortality by certain divines in a sense
which it requires considerable subtlety to distinguish
from a denial, and for the absence of such a hope in
some of those lay philosophers in whom one would
most expect to find it.

The beginning of any valid argument for immor-
tality must be a vindication of the reality and the
value of the individual soul. For such a vindication
I of course have no tune. I can only say that I
assume the general line of thought which has recently
been brilliantly developed by Professor Pringle-
Pattison in his Idea of God ; and still more con-
vincingly, and (I must add) more consistently, by
Professor Sorley in his Moral Values and the Idea of
God. But the fullest recognition of the reality and
limited activity of the individual soul will not help-
even to suggest the idea of immortality unless there
is also a strong confidence in the validity of our moral
judgments. Speaking broadly, the moral argument
for immortality is based upon the affirmation of the

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GOD AND MAN

moral consciousness that, given such a being as man is
in such a world as this is, man ought to be immortal.
But the fact that we affirm man ought to be immortal
supplies no reason for thinking that he actually is
immortal unless we are able to treat these moral
judgments as valid judgments about reality, judg-
ments which we have as much right to use in building
up our conception of the Universe as any other part
of the knowledge about its nature revealed by, or
implied in, our experience of that little bit of the
Universe with which we are in immediate contact.
And this is just what is generally denied, with more
or less emphasis and consistency, by those who tend
to regard the individual mind as mere appearance.
From mere appearance to false and delusive appear-
ance is but a short step. In proportion as the
individual is regarded as a mere appearance, an
inconsistent, misleading, and rather contemptible
appearance of the Absolute, possessing value merely
in proportion as he contributes to the life of some
larger Whole, his judgments as to what is really
valuable, and any claims which he may make on the
strength of them to recognition and satisfaction and
greater fullness of life, are discredited in advance.
Any arguments which may be based upon the evil
or imperfection of a Universe in which such a being
as man is doomed to a very imperfect development,
a maimed and often painful existence and an early
extinction, are set aside as arising from the too
limited and one-sided, the merely subjective charac-
ter, of human judgments about right and wrong.
Looked at from the point of view of the whole, we
are assured, the atrocities and the sufferings of the
late war are as beautiful a thing, as essential a
contribution to the perfection of the alone valuable
Whole, as German Philosophy or English Philan-
thropy. Such is the avowed attitude of men like
Mr. Bradley and Professor Bosanquet ; and even in
their more Christian-minded imitators there are

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

traces of the same contempt for mere morality, and
for the estimates of human sin and suffering which
mere moral judgments entail ; though in them it
may take the form of exalting the mystical intuition
in the light of which, even without any hope of
individual survival, it is seen that all things are and
always have been very good that is to say, good for
the few mystics who enjoy these experiences, and the
Absolute of whose existence theirs is a part. For
any serious examination of this position I have no
time. All I can do is to admit that without a
thoroughgoing respect for the moral consciousness
and its affirmations, no argument for immortality
a. personal or even, if such language has any meaning,
an impersonal immortality can possibly be con-
structed. All I can say by way of argument on this
head is to challenge the objectors to give any reason
-why human judgments about right and wrong should
be distrusted more than those human judgments the
validity of which is assumed hi the argument directed
towards the discrediting of them. 1

Assuming then the existence of God and self and
the validity of our highest ideals of good, why
cannot we construct a reasonable and self-consistent
idea of the Universe without immortality ? In one
of the most penetrating attacks upon the hope of
immortality, or at least upon this particular argu-
ment for immortality, which I have ever read an
article, " The Ethics of Immortal Reward," 2 by
Professor Laird in a recent number of the Hibbert
Journal it is suggested that the moral argument for
immortality really implies the retributive theory of

1 This does not imply the " ethical obsession " against which Dean Inge
of St. Paul's protests if by that is meant the view that only the good will
has value to the exclusion of knowledge and aesthetic experience and other
forms of spiritual life ; it does mean (a) that the good-will (which of course
cannot exist apart from knowledge and feeling) is assigned the highest
value, and (b) that the moral consciousness is recognised as the judge of
the value to be assigned to other elements in life.

2 Vol. XVI, p. 580 (1918). In his Problems of the Self Prof. Laird leaves
the question wholly open, maintaining that Psychology has nothing to say
lor or against the belief.

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GOD AND MAN

Punishment and the corresponding theory of Reward,
and has no basis apart from it. The argument, as
he understands it, is supposed to run thus. Our
moral consciousness assures us that goodness ought
to be rewarded, and vice punished. But the ordinary
course of Nature shows hardly any tendency to-
secure an adequate reward for virtue or punishment
for vice. Assuming that there exists a spiritual
Being capable of rewarding virtue and punishing
vice, and assuming that these moral judgments of
ours represent the nature and will of that Being, it
must be supposed that He will provide a future life
wherein these rewards and these punishments shall
be brought into existence. Such is undoubtedly in
substance the way in which the argument was
stated by thinkers like Kant and Bishop Butler, and
in wljich it is still sometimes propounded more
often perhaps by theologians than by philosophers.
But this seems to me a wholly inadequate statement
of what is meant by the moral argument in the form
in which it would find most philosophical support at
the present day. It seems to be the last infirmity of
acute philosophic minds that they can seldom state
the case of their opponents in its strongest form, and
prefer to win easy triumphs over some antiquated
version or some gross caricature of the case they have,
really got to meet. I agree with Professor Laird in
rejecting the notion that punishment is an end in
itself, and that reward can be claimed as a matter of
right or abstract justice. But the Professor proceeds
to argue that, if there is no reason why vice should be
punished or virtue rewarded, then the inequalities
of human life, the sufferings of the righteous, the
spectacle of the wicked flourishing as a green bay-
tree, the great tragedies of history, the low degree of
happiness attainable in the three-score years and ten
of average human existence all these constitute no.
argument why the Universe should not be regarded
as a just and reasonable Universe even without the

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

hope of any future life for the individual. Whatever
be Professor Laird's exact attitude towards Theism,
he very emphatically states his belief that the
Universe has moral ends and that these ends are
fulfilled. That being so, he would, I presume,
account for the presence of evil in such a universe as
being a necessary means to the good. If we refuse
to regard pleasure as the only or the chief good and
pain as the supreme evil, then we must suppose that
the existence of real evil in the world is the necessary
condition for the production of the highest good in
the world for the development of character and
intellect, and especially character for the evolution
of souls freely willing the good for its own sake. If
this is Professor Laird's position, I am in hearty
agreement with it. Now some measure of such
moral goodness and of other high values is undoubt-
edly produced by this Universe, and therefore so it
seems to be suggested the Universe has got all the
justification that Reason can demand. Or, to put it
theistically, the world is such a world as can be
supposed to be willed by a God whose nature is
revealed by our highest judgments of value. Now I
believe profoundly that, so far as it goes, Professor
Laird's theodicy if such it is intended to be is
right. I should insist, indeed, that the willing of a
world with so much evil in it implies a certain
limitation of the divine Power ; and I should point
out that, though we can see the necessity for the
evil up to a certain point, we cannot see in detail the
necessity for all the evil that actually exist. But
still substantially it is right, as it seems to me, to find
the explanation of the evil so far as our limited
intelligence can find it at all in the values which are
realised in and by the struggle against it, and in the
other values to the production of which we must
suppose the evil to be a necessary means. The value
of moral goodness is not dependent upon the fact of
its being rewarded here or hereafter any more than

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GOD AND MAN

the value of intellectual activity or of aesthetic
enjoyment : it is good in itself. Moral evil is none
the less evil because in some cases it may lead to a
life in which pleasure predominates. Professor
Laird even maintains that the " impartiality of the
universe, miscalled indifference, is precisely what
ought to occur in a moral universe/' by which I
suppose is meant that it is conducive to the moral
ends of the Universe that virtue should often not be
rewarded, and wickedness often prosper. And up to
a certain point, this is a proposition which can hardly
be denied. Kant long ago maintained that if we
had the same certainty as to the existence of future
rewards and punishments as we have of the existence
of the Sun and Moon, it might " corrupt the purity of
our wills." Many theologians have said the same
thing in other words. But is this theodicy sufficient ?
I do not think Professor Laird sufficiently recognises
that to justify the Universe as an expression of
Reason and Goodness it is not enough to show that
in it certain values are realised : we must find
grounds for believing that the good is sufficient to
outweigh the evil, the pain and misery, the ignorance
and stupidity and the sin which also exist in the
world. And is this actually the case ?

I for one cannot take a contemptuous view of the
value either of pleasure or of happiness : and Pro-
fessor Laird is quite emphatic in asserting that
" happiness is good and pain is bad." Pleasure is
of many different kinds : some kinds of it are
doubtless of very little value some perhaps have a
negative value, but other kinds of pleasure are of
high value, and pleasure is an element in all the
highest and most desirable kinds of conscious life.
I cannot, therefore, dismiss the pleasure-side of life
in the light and airy way which is fashionable with
some idealistic philosophers. Nor can I regard it as
a note of moral elevation to be indifferent to the
negative value of other people's pain. And when I

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ask myself whether the good that is realised in this
transitory existence (if this were all) is really worth
.all the pain that it costs, I begin to have doubts.
The doubts are strengthened when we turn to the
higher goods, when we think of the small number of
those who have participated to any high degree in
the best intellectual life, in the highest aesthetic
enjoyment, in the most satisfying forms of practical
activity. And when we turn to the strictly ethical
side of life, how few are those who have attained ;
how mixed has been the character even of the
reputed saints and heroes ; how low has been the
general level, how appalling the mass of sin and
selfishness, excuseless cruelty and irrational hate !
Is the good that is produced really worth the misery,
the ugliness, the sin which it has cost ?

After all, would any one of us like to be responsible
ior the creation of the world as it is ? No doubt it may
"be suggested that the question implies a creation in
time such as modern philosophers and men of Science
are pretty well unanimous in rejecting. But the
question is a quite legitimate one for anyone who
thinks of the world, including the being of the lesser
spirits to whose life it is organic, as a world created
by a universal Mind in the sense that it expresses the
ultimate nature of that Mind for anyone, that is,
who attaches any sort of meaning to the idea of
creation, though it may be conceived of as an eternal
creation. I repeat, then, would any of us care to be
responsible for the evil of the world ? Or (if from an
indeterminist point of view you plead that part of
this evil is due to the undetermined choice of partially
free spirits) would any of us care to be responsible
for allowing this evil to go on, and for directly causing
the evil that is not due to human freedom, for the
sake of such hedonistic, intellectual, and moral
values as are actually realised in the world's history
up to the present date ? And without any pessi-
mistic disparagement of possible future progress we

GOD AND MAN

may add the further question, " Is there any sober
ground for anticipating such a quality and quantity
of life in the future as will be worth the thousands
of years during which the highest attainments have
been rare and very imperfect, the general level low,
the abysses of misery and of sin profound and
terrible ? " If it rested with one of us to determine
whether the life of this planet should go on, if by
pressing a button he could put a stop to all the
conscious life upon it, would he feel justified in
refusing to press that button ? For myself, I think
I should say " Great as is the good that I know I
am extinguishing, I cannot make myself responsible
for a continuance of our present horrors." I think
I should have to press the button. Still more certain
am I that I should have pressed the button, had I
been given that opportunity in the days (say) of
palaeolithic man. And I am sure most people will
agree with me, or would do so but for the operation
of certain powerful prejudices. Why should we
suppose God to be so much less loving and com-
passionate than man ? If that is the way in which we,
in the exercise of that moral judgment which supplies
our only means of judging about these questions,
feel bound to think, why should we suppose that
God thinks otherwise ? If we deny that our moral
judgments have any application to God or the
Absolute, we have no ground left for saying that
God is good. There is only one way in which the
good realised in these years of earthly life can be
supposed adequately to outweigh the evil ; and that
is to look upon earthly life as but a part, a prelimin-
ary part, a relatively short stage in the development
of souls which have a long period of development and
vast possibilities of increasingly valuable experience
open to them after they have been delivered from
the bodily organisms which determine, and which
limit, their present capacities for action and for
enjoyment. With the hypothesis of immortality we

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

can regard the world as a reasonable word expressive
of a purpose for the realisation of the highest possible
.good, and a purpose which on the whole and in the
end will be accomplished : without immortality I do
not see that we can. To put it more simply, with
immortality we can believe that God is Love, and
the world an expression of that Love : without it we
cannot.

So far I have been speaking of the total mass of
good and evil in the world. In a reasonable Universe
there must be no evil that is not necessary as a
means to, or a condition of, the realisation of good ;
and the good realised must be worth the evil involved
in the means greater than the evil, I should be
disposed to say much greater, because the absence
of good is such a much less evil than the presence of
evil. But I am not prepared, as Professor Laird
seems to be, to ignore altogether the question of
distribution. Such good as is realised in human life
seems hardly worth the evil that it costs ; but not
only so ; that good is most unequally distributed.
Goods of all kinds the highest as well as the lowest
are distributed in a way which suggests the wildest
caprice. If it be insisted that the highest goods can
only be realised by personal exertion, there is cer-
tainly no equality of opportunity in respect of the
highest any more than of the lowest goods. Unless
(like Origen) we believe in a pre-natal fall, unless we
Relieve that man's spiritual privileges in the present
life are the consequences of pre-natal effort or pre-
natal sin, it is not the fault of one man that he was
born an African devil-worshipper or due to the virtue
of another that he was born a Christian. I cannot
follow Professor Laird in regarding this utter lack of
correspondence between virtue and happiness as no
evil or even as a positive good. I am not prepared
to say that a righteous will is not justified in causing
a very unequal distribution of good if that is neces-
sary to increase the quantity of good on the whole.

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GOD AND MAN

The best men, in the exercise of their voluntary
activity, constantly cause pain to one man in order
to secure a greater good to a greater number. And
certainly, if God is in any sense the cause or the
ground of this world, that is the only principle upon
which it is possible to explain the actual distribution
of goods upon this planet. I do not say that justice-
requires that the wicked should be punished, except
so far as they can be made better thereby : nor do
I say that the good ought to be rewarded in exact
proportion to merit. But I do regard this very
unequal distribution of goods as an evil. If we are
justified in believing a future life as the only hy-
pothesis on which the quantity and quality of good
here attainable can be regarded as worth the evil,
we are justified equally in hoping for a state in which
there will be some nearer approach to justice hi
distribution : and without that future state there
cannot even be that predominance of good over evil
which might justify some inequality of distribution.
I am not now reverting to the retributive theory.
Because one gives up the idea of retributive justice,,
that is no reason why one should give up the ideal
of distributive justice that ideal which was so
strongly emphasised, for instance, by the late Pro-
fessor Sidgwick, who was no believer in retributive
punishment or reward. I do not say that justice
demands that virtue should be rewarded with other
goods. But I do say that it does require that, so far
as possible, every soul that is created should enjoy
some good proportionate to its capacity. The pos-
sibilities even of virtue are most unequally dis-
tributed. And virtue by itself is not the whole good
of life. The life of the virtuous man on the rack has
a value, no doubt ; but there is one thing better than
the life of a virtuous man on the rack, and that is the
life of a virtuous man off the rack. Happiness is
part, though it is not the whole, of " our being's end
and goal," and happiness does include pleasure and.

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

the absence of pain. If this life were all, then that
true end of life, that supreme beatitude which
includes both virtue and happiness, the enjoyment
of knowledge and beauty and much besides would
be missed, or enjoyed but in a most imperfect
measure and for some transitory moment, by a very
large proportion of the best men. And that is an
evil. The ideal which our judgments of value hold
up to us would have to be pronounced to be un-
attainable, and the attainable approximation to it
a very distant approximation for the vast majority.
Is a Universe so constituted a reasonable Universe ?
We need not, it seems to me, postulate even in the
future life any exact compensation in proportion to
merit or to sufferings previously borne ; but it is
reasonable to hope for a life in which the other
elements of the ideal life will become attainable for
those who have reached the higher levels of goodness.
The morally good ought to be made happy, not
because they have earned a reward, but because, if
they are not, the true good will be attainable by no
one, no when, and nowhere. That is the element of
truth which lies at the bottom of the popular demand
that the good shall be rewarded. As for the more
imperfect characters the less good, the average
men, the wicked positive punishment is, indeed,
justifiable only as a means : but for them, even more
than for the righteous, the attainment of the true end
of their being is possible only on the hypothesis of
a future life, in which, whether by painful or by other
means, they may be rendered capable of the higher
goods and of the sort of happiness which cannot exist
without the higher goods, but which the higher
goods cannot by themselves secure.

Professor Laird seems to think that the Universe
is sufficiently rationalised or moralised if there is in
it some amount of goodness and some amount of
happiness, but that there is no reason at all why the
two should go together or be enjoyed by the same

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persons. I venture to hold that the supreme good
does not lie either in goodness or in happiness
enjoyed separately or by different persons, but in a
life which is both good and happy (not to mention
the other elements of good which it will include) ;
and if this supreme good is to be enjoyed by anyone,
it must be enjoyed by some definite person or persons.
If it is not so enjoyed, it does not exist at all, and to
that extent the end of a moral Universe remains
unrealised. To my mind it is an evil that any
human being should miss such a life ; and it is evil
or irrational that the elements of it should only be
enjoyed separately. It is an evil that those who
possess the highest thing in life should never enjoy
that lower good without which the highest good is
not the good. It is an evil that the wicked should
permanently get pleasure or happiness, because the
pleasure or happiness which is compatible with
wickedness is a good of a very low order ; and its
enjoyment, so far as bad men do enjoy it, tends to
make them incapable of a much higher good. A
Universe which would not ultimately bring about a
greater co-existence of the higher and the lower
elements of good than now exists is not a Universe
to which I should think it reasonable to attribute a
moral purpose. To put the matter in more definitely
theistic and Christian terms, it would be a Universe
which could not be reasonably regarded in as any
sense the expression of a righteous and loving Will.

To put the whole argument in another way, the
true ground of the ethical demand for immortality
lies in the unrealised capacities of human nature.
Humanity is capable of, and (if any teleological
assumption is justified) seems made for, a good so
much higher than any that is actually attainable in
this life. The good actually realised seems. hardly
worth the cost. Unless this realisation can be
carried further, it would seem better that so little
good, mixed with so much evil, should not have been

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

at all. That is what we naturally think those of
us whose eyes are adequately open to both sides of
the matter, the poverty of the actual realisation, the
supreme value of the life of which in brief and fitful
glimpses humanity shows itself capable. And so we
must suppose God to think, if God is anything like
humanity at its best. A God of love could not
create such a world. The contrast between the
immensity of human capacity and the poorness of
the attainment that is the inmost kernel of all the
great classical arguments for immortality. That is
the thought which underlies the famous Platonic
arguments, so indefensible as mere pieces of dialectic.
That is the thought which Kant somewhat degraded
or caricatured. That is the real meaning of the one
argument which Jesus Christ ever used on the sub-
ject. A Being who was ever thought worthy of such
communion with God as the heroes of the Hebrew
race were thought to have enjoyed could not be
destined for so poor and transitory a life as this
world would be, if this were all. " God is not the
God of the dead but of the living." So poor and so
transitory : the transitoriness is part of the poverty.
For I cannot sympathise with those who loftily
pretend that true values have nothing to do with
duration. A tenth of a second of the direst torture
ever endured by man would be a negligible evil ; and
who would care for an intellectual insight, an
aesthetic rapture, a supremest blessedness which
lasted only for such a period ? Our life here is in
time. Once again, a God of love could not have
doomed humanity to such a life, unless indeed His
power is limited to an extent which would seem
hardly compatible with the ascription to Him of any
power at all. The attempt to combine the Christian
view of God with the denial of immortality is peculi-
arly difficult for thinkers who are full of lofty scorn
for the idea of even such a limitation of God's power
as has been recognised by most orthodox theologians.

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GOD AND MAN

I have given you a bare outline of what I believe
to be the true argument for immortality. I am
deeply conscious of the difficulties of the conception :
but to me it is the only way of escape from the
greater difficulties which stand in the way of every
other possible theory of the Universe of all non-
theistic theories and of a Theism without immortality,
But difficulties are not necessarily objections. It
may be possible for a theory of the Universe to
escape contradiction or fatal objections : no theory
can escape difficulties. Many lectures would be
wanted if I were to try to meet possible objections :
but there is one about which I must say just a word.
I shall be told in many quarters that I have been
assuming the reality of time, and that that is an
assumption which no philosopher can make. I am
afraid that my reply must be brief and dogmatic.
All our experience is in time, and we can form no
intelligible conception of an experience which is out
of time. That is admitted by most of those who
talk so glibly about Reality or the Absolute, or
perhaps even their own individual selves, being " out
of time." They feel driven to it by certain lines of
argument, but they admit that they do not really
know what it means. When, as is sometimes the
case, they are scornful about personal survival and
yet speak of personal immortality, they are com-
pelled at every turn to use language which implies
time. 1 I for one do not think that an appeal
to the unintelligible is any real solution of difficul-
ties. For us nothing is out of tune except truth
and true judgments ; and judgments are not real
existences.

1 " Space and time do not belong to the eternal world. . . . Eternal life
is no diffusion or dilution of personality, but its consummation. It seems
certain then that in such a state of existence individuality must be main-
tained." (Outspoken Essays, by W. R. Inge, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's,
p. 276.) The word " maintained " of course implies persistence in time.
" If my particular life-meaning passes out of activity, it will be because
the larger life, to which I belong, no longer needs that form of expression.
My death, like my birth, will have a teleological justification, to which my
supratemporal self will consent." (Ibid., p. 273 : Italics mine.)

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PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

To say that we are eternal because it will always
be true that we have lived, and that our life possessed
a value, 1 is merely to trifle with a serious problem :
and yet that is what seems to be meant by a future
life for the individual which will not be in time. I
quite recognise the force of the old Kantian antinomy
the impossibility of thinking either of a first event,
a beginning of time, or of an endless series of events
both ways. But it is no solution of that difficulty
to talk about time as merely an appearance, as
purely subjective or phenomenal and the like. If
and so far as it is an appearance, all our lives our
joys, our sorrows, our knowledge, our morality, our
sins, God Himself as thought of by us are mere
appearances too. That is admitted by the philo-
sopher who has most logically followed out this line
of thought ; and he ends by admitting also that the
Absolute is after all an entity which exists only in
these appearances. Therefore, after all, the appear-
ances are the only reality there is. It is perhaps not
impossible to justify belief in a future life, and even
an endless future, upon the assumption that the
Absolute is tuneless. If the Absolute (or the
Universe as a whole) somehow includes- within itself
the experiences which we call lives in time, even on
that view there is no reason why it should not
contain within itself immortal lives in tune. The
unending life will be an appearance, no doubt, but
it need not be less real than the life that now is.
Doubtless we cannot think how endless lives should
be comprised within a timeless reality : but neither
can we understand how a life of six weeks should be
an element in a tuneless reality. And the same line

1 " If every life in this world represents an unique purpose in the Divine
mind, and if the end or meaning of soul-life, though striven for in time, has
both its source and its achievement in eternity, this, the value and reality
of the individual life, must remain as a distinct fact in the spiritual world."
(Inge, Outspoken Essays, p. 276.) Elsewhere the Dean tells us that it is
a legitimate hope that in another life the Soul may be able to act more
freely (The Philosophy of Plotinus, i, 264). I find it quite impossible to
reconcile his various utterances on the subject.

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GOD AND MAN

of reply, I may say in passing, might be adopted
against those who object to personal immortality on
the ground of the unreality of the individual person,
and talk about an impersonal immortality in which
the person will somehow be swallowed up. Granted
that the individual is unreal, a mere appearance, and
generally contemptible : there is no reason why an
immortal self should not be at least as real as a
mortal one. And that perhaps would satisfy most
of us. These are not mere argumenta ad hominem ;
they tend to show the impossibility of reconciling the
mode of thought on which the objections are based
with the actual laws of human thinking, and still
more with an even approximately Christian presenta-
tion of the Universe. Those who deny personal
immortality on the ground that the temporal is
unreal are equally bound to reduce to the level of
mere appearance the present self, our present notions
of morality and sin, God Himself, so far as He is
knowable at all: The more logical of them avowedly
do so.

My own way of dealing with the antinomy about
time is far too simple to please philosophers. It is
simply to recognise that here we come to the limits
of human thought. Doubtless there must be a way
of " transcending " the antinomy. Doubtless God
knows what it is, but we do not. Doubtless God
must be supposed Himself in some way to transcend
time : we may if we like call Him " supra tempus "
(that is much better than " out of time "), but we
do not know how this transcendence is effected. And
I have never read any philosopher's attempt to effect
that transcendence which does not fall into manifold
more antinomies and contradictions than it escapes.
We cannot transcend the antinomy : but, just as the
existence of that antinomy is no reason for not
believing in the Sciences which assume a real differ-
ence between past, present, and future, and for not
treating as real and very important the selves which

0:40

PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

are in time, so that unsolved difficulty supplies us
with no reason for not accepting the conclusion to
which we are led no less inevitably by the use of our
intellectual faculties that the only way in which
the world can be supposed adequately to fulfil a
rational purpose is by supposing that after death
there will be a continuance of this personal life for
the individual. That conception is doubtless in-
adequate ; but it is less inadequate than the meaning-
less assertion that time exists within a timeless
reality, or the still more self-contradictory assertion
that at a certain date in the future / shall pass out
of time into the timeless.

One word on a further objection. It is very
common among philosophers to assume that, if you
believe in personal immortality, you are bound to
believe in personal pre-existence. That assumption
seems to me part of that deep-rooted philosophical
prejudice that the temporal is a synonym for the
unreal or the contemptible, that there is no such
thing as real change, that nothing ever really hap-
pens, that the whole drama of events in the natural
world and in the innermost life of souls is all a
phantasmagoric representation of a static Reality.
What the purpose or the value of such a representa-
tion or misrepresentation may be, is a question
which does not seem to trouble such thinkers, 1 and
indeed it would seem from such a point of view that
there can be no real purpose in the Universe as a
whole : for at the end of the procession, or at every
point of it, you are only just where you were at the
beginning. The eternal " as you were " is always
the end of all human and of aU divine actions, in so
far as we can still talk about action in a static world.
From such a point of view it may well seem, as it has
seemed to some, a grotesque supposition that the
fluctuations of the birth-rate can affect the quantity

1 Unless, as some have suggested, we say that it supplies timeless diver-
sion to the Absolute.

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GOD AND MAN

of real being in the Universe. 1 Against such a point
of view the system of M. Bergson is a much-needed,
though exaggerated, protest exaggerated, because
I for one fail to understand the idea of change
without the complementary idea of something which
persists through change. I must once again express
my admiring agreement with the searching criticism
to which this whole line of thought has recently been
subjected by Professor Pringle-Pattison and Pro-
fessor Sorley 2 When once this prejudice against
the idea of change is abandoned, there is nothing
unreasonable in the ordinary doctrine of immortality
without pre-existence, though I should be far from
wishing to describe as unchristian or irrational a
doctrine which was held by Origen. The short
answer to the objection about pre-existence is that,
if the belief in immortality is based upon moral
considerations upon the impossibility of rational-
ising the Universe without it, then we may disbelieve
in life before birth because it is not required for the
rationalisation of the Universe, and believe in life
after death because it is so required. What is the
ultimate goal of that continued progress towards the
good in which both the present life and the life
beyond must be supposed to consist is a question
which our inability to understand the true nature of
Time prevents us from answering : but, if there be
any truth in the moral argument, we may be content
with feeling sure that the solution must be one
which will give a real meaning to the idea of salvation
a meaning which cannot be given to it by any

1 " A kingdom of heaven inhabited by a population of spiritual monads,
the number of which is determined by the fluctuations in the birth-rate and
the duration of human life on this planet ... is hardly credible except as a
symbolical picture." (Inge, Personal Idealism and Mysticism, p. 182.)
I need hardly say that the doctrine of " impervious monads " is not
maintained in this Essay or by most of the writers against whom the Dean
seems to be tilting.

2 I am most completely in agreement with Prof. Sorley who. much more
definitely than Prof. Pringle-Pattison, regards the belief in personal
immortality as vital to any theory which represents the Universe as
rational.

PERSONAL IMMORTALITY

philosophy which reduces change, human effort,
personal existence to unreal seemings within the
being of a changeless, unpurposeful, super-moral,
and impersonal Absolute. All attempts to christian-
ise such a Universe seem to me to represent an
illogical, vacillating, and at bottom unintelligible
halting between two fundamentally opposed and
incompatible points of view.

May I conclude with one word of protest against
the cheap sneers indulged in by many philosophers
who either disbelieve, or, while professing in some
sense to believe, seek to disparage, the doctrine of
personal immortality. They persistently represent
it as springing from a mercenary hankering after
personal reward, or a personal dislike of extinction,
from which, often with considerable self-complacency
they profess themselves immune. Such sneers are
as unjustified and as unworthy as the old suggestion,
long since abandoned by reputable theologians, that
the real motive of " infidelity " is to be found in a
personal desire for vicious self-indulgence and a fear
of the penalties which, if religion were true, would
await it in another world. St. Paul was willing to
be accursed for his brethren's sake, if they could be
saved : but he would not have looked upon the
extinction of those brethren at the moment of death
with the wonderful complacency with which the
philosophers in question seem to contemplate the
extinction of the millions who have, so far, had little
reason to be grateful for their existence. Which is
the more refined, the more exalted, and (as some of
the philosophers in question profess the Christian
religion) I will add the more Christian frame of mind
which attitude may most reasonably be attributed
to the supreme Mind I will leave you to judge.
Doubtless our wishes even our disinterested wishes
are no proof that their object is attainable : but,
if the Universe is so constituted as habitually to
thwart the desire naturally felt by the best men in

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GOD AND MAN

their best moments, I do not myself see how it is
possible to think of that Universe as expressing the
nature of a Mind which is supposed to have made the
fullest revelation of Himself in the human mind, and
in particular in its judgments of value. 1 I do not
understand a philosophy which proposes to find in
our judgments of value the clue to the inmost nature
of Reality, and yet treats the hope of Immortality as
irrational, immoral, or contemptible. In view of its
many difficulties, I can understand only too well
many degrees of hopeful confidence or of regretful
doubt in minds which share this fundamental con-
viction. I can understand in short any attitude but
one that of contemptuous indifference.

1 1 need not say that the whole of my argument is immensely strength-
ened for those who regard this revelation of God in humanity as culminating
in a unique revelation in Christ.

144

VI

WHAT IS JUSTICE P 1
I. THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

A VERY slight acquaintance with the social aiid
economic discussions of the present day is enough to
excite surprise at the ease with which people per-
suade themselves that they know well enough what
justice is, however great the difficulty of bringing it
about. As of old, in Plato's day, men are engaged
in hot debate about " just things " the justice of
this or that particular social arrangement, while they
complacently ignore the fundamental question,
" What is Justice itself ? " No doubt we all have
some rough and ready working idea of justice, which
might serve well enough for many, if not most,
practical purposes. And if the discussions to which
I have alluded were limited to immediately practic-
able measures, we might perhaps be able to get on
without any denned theoretical idea of justice in
general. But at the present day the immediate
reform proposed is often advocated or opposed, not
on its own merits, but because it is regarded as a
step towards some ideal reconstruction of society
which presents itself to one party as the ultimate
ami of all political effort, and to the other as funda-
mentally opposed to that very abstract justice in
whose name the reform is demanded. People may
agree, for instance, as to the practical justice of an
eight-hours day ; but the legislative enactment of
an eight-hours day commends itself to some who
would admit that this particular advantage could be
gained by other means, precisely because it is con-
sidered a step towards a State-regulated equality of
conditions ; while to others who would have no
objection to the particular measure, the means of
obtaining it seems objectionable because it asserts a

1 Reprinted from the Economic Review, Vol. I, pp. 466-485 (October.
1891).

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GOD AND MAN

principle the logical application of which involves
the very essence of Injustice, or (as Aristotle would
have put it) equality for the unequal. When the
most everyday questions of practical politics are
thus debated on the most speculative grounds, it
becomes a matter of pressing importance to examine
the theoretical basis of the ultimate social ideals to
which appeal is made, and particularly of the
fundamental conception which, though not the
whole, is an essential part of all of them Justice.

Among the current popular conceptions of Justice
the most prominent are perhaps

1. The ideal of Equality Every one to count for
one, and nobody for more than one.

2. The ideal of just Recompense To every one
according to his work.

I propose in the following pages to examine the
meaning of the above propositions, and to ask how
much guidance they are capable of affording as
ultimate canons of political justice. When we have
ascertained the limits within which each of these
doctrines can reasonably be propounded (i) as
ideally true, (2) as capable of practical application, it
may be easier to ask how far there is any funda-
mental opposition between what present themselves
at first sight as antagonistic and inconsistent ideals.

In examining the doctrine of Equality, it is essen-
tial to bear in mind the context in which it stands.
It was put forward by Bentham (not, of course, for
the first time) as a canon for the distribution of
happiness ; and it is obvious that the Greatest
Happiness principle, or the principle of Greatest
Good (however Good be interpreted), stands in need
of that or some other supplementary canon before it
can be available for practical application. It is
obvious that in a community of a hundred persons
we might produce the greatest possible happiness or
good in a variety of ways. It would be quite
legitimate, so far as the Greatest Happiness principle

146

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

is concerned, to give the whole of our disposable good
to twenty-five out of the hundred, and ignore the
other seventy-five, provided that by so doing we
could make each of these twenty-five four times as
happy as we should make each of the hundred by an
equal distribution ; and if by an unequal distribution
we could make twenty-five people five tunes as
happy, or give them five times as much good (what-
ever the true good be) as we could procure for each
of the hundred by an equal distribution, we should be
absolutely bound by our Greatest Good principle
(taken by itself) to ignore the seventy-five, and dis-
tribute our good exclusively among the twenty-five.
So long as the amount of good would be neither
increased nor diminished by an equal distribution, it
will hardly be denied as an abstract principle that
justice requires an equal distribution. It is true
that the principle is an exceedingly abstract one. It
merely asserts that if you have a certain quantity of
good to dispose of between A and B, you ought to
give half to A and half to B, so long as all you know
about them is that one is A and the other B, or other
things being equal, or so long as there is no reason for
preferring A to B. How far the axiom ought to be
modified in its practical application by the fact that
A never does differ from B solely in being a different
individual, and what kind of inequality between A
and B supplies reasonable ground for an inequality
in the shares assigned to A and B respectively, are
questions which must be postponed. But, for the
present, I assume that it will be generally admitted as
a self-evident truth, that equality is the right rule for
distributive justice in the absence of any special
reason for inequality. Our first difficulty arises in
the case where an equal distribution of good neces-
sarily diminishes the amount of good to be dis-
tributed. It will hardly be denied that this is often
the case. It is easy to imagine cases where the
difficulty arises in connection with an actual distribu-

147

GOD AND MAN

tion of a definite and assignable good to a definite
and assignable number of persons. In a beleaguered
garrison nobody would question the justice of an
equal distribution of rations ; but supposing it were
known that relief could not arrive for a month, and
the provisions available could keep half of them
alive, while an equal distribution would insure the
slow starvation of the whole, it would surely be
better to cast lots as to which half should be fed and
which should starve. I do not maintain that the
exact conditions indicated could ever be exactly
forthcoming, or even that the course suggested would
be actually the right one to take if they were. But
if that course would not be right in the case supposed,
it must be for some other reason than its injustice.
No one would be bold enough to propose that the
whole garrison should starve simply to insure an
ideal equality between all the individuals concerned.
In a less extreme form the difficulty I have indicated
is of constant occurrence. The schoolmaster, for
instance, has to face the problem how far a whole
class is to be kept back that the ultra-stupid minority
may learn something. And when we turn from
detailed questions of individual conduct to large
problems of social and political action, the case
supposed is not the exception but the rule. Nobody
will deny that the present distribution of good things
is excessively and arbitrarily unequal. The most
satisfied champion of the existing social order will
not deny that many people are badly clothed, badly
fed, over-worked, and otherwise miserable through
no fault of their own. And the most extreme
advocate of social reconstruction, who is at once sane
and well-informed, will hardly deny that any attempt
to produce an immediate equality of possessions, or
of happiness, or of opportunities (whichever it be),
would only cure these inequalities by producing, in
no long period, a general dead-level of misery and
want, or (to put it at the lowest) by seriously dimin-

148

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

ishing the ultimate well-being of the country or the
race. Here, then, an unequal distribution has to be
adopted in order that there may be something to
distribute. Either we may say (from a rough and
practical point of view) that equality is a good, but
it is not the good, and that we must in practice
"balance the principle of Greatest Good against the
principle of Equality, or (with more scientific
precision) we may assert that in such cases there is
no real sacrifice of equality. The law is fulfilled
even in the case wherein its practical operation seems
to involve the height of inequality, just as the laws
of motion are fulfilled when two opposite forces
neutralise each other and produce rest. For what
the individual is entitled to is simply equality of
.consideration. The individual has had his rights even
when the equal rights of others demand that in
practice he should receive no good at all, but even a
considerable allowance of evil. It would be the
height of injustice, indeed, that the good of ninety
among a hundred people should be considered, and
the well-being of the remaining ten wholly ignored.
The ninety and the ten are entitled to consideration
precisely in the ratio of ninety to ten. The rights of
the ten would be grossly violated if the ninety were
to do what would be best for themselves were the
remaining ten out of the way ; as, for instance, by
dividing among themselves all the available provi-
sions, and giving none to the excluded ten. On the
other hand there are cases where it would not only be
expedient, but just, that ten men should die that
the remaining ninety might live, e.g. in case of a
forlorn hope in war. In such cases the minority
.gets its rights as fully as the majority, provided its
proportionate claim to consideration has been duly
satisfied before it was determined that the measure
proposed was on the whole for the general good.

The distinction that has just been laid down seems
io me of considerable practical importance.

149

GOD AND MAN

I. In the^ first place, it is of importance in connec-
tion with the Philosophy of Rights. I am at a loss to
discover any tangible concrete thing, or any " liberty
of action in acquisition," to which it can be con-
tended that every individual human being has a
right under all circumstances. There are circum-
stances under which the satisfaction of any and
every such right is a physical impossibility. And if
every assertion of right is to be conditioned by the
clause " if it be possible," we might as well boldly
say that every man, woman, and child on the earth's
surface has a right to 1000 a year. There is every
bit as much reason for such an assertion as for
maintaining that every one has right to the means
of subsistence, or to three acres and a cow, or to
life, or to liberty, or to the Parliamentary franchise,
or to propagate his species, or the like. There are
conditions under which none of these rights can be
given to one man without prejudice to the equal
rights of others. There seems, then, to be no " right
of Man " which is unconditional, except the right to
consideration that is to say, a right to have his
true well-being (whatever that be x ) regarded as of
equal importance in all social arrangements with the
well-being of everybody else. Elaborate expositions
of the rights of man seem to me, at best, attempts to
formulate the leading rights which an application of
the principle of Equality would require to be con-
ceded to the generality of men at a particular stage
of social development. They are all ultimately
resolvable into the one supreme and unconditional
right the right to equal consideration.

2. It is more to our present purpose to notice that
most of the crude or dangerous misapplications of the-
doctrine of Equality spring from the neglect of this
principle from the attempt to translate an abstract
equality of consideration into an immediate equality

1 For fear of misunderstanding, I may say at once that I entirely deny
the hedonistic identification of Good with Pleasant. By Good or Well-
being I mean something like the Aristotelian

150

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

of concrete possessions, or liberties, or political
power, or what not. Most of the objections to the
doctrine may (I think) be met by bearing in mind the
distinction on which I have been dwelling.

Thus it might be objected to the principle of
Equality, that an attempt to realise the immediate
equality of property, or of some particular kind of
property, might be good for the present generation,
though it would lead to ultimate anarchy. The
objection is met if it is remembered that future
generations have rights as well as the present.
Generations yet unborn may have the right to con-
sideration ; though that is obviously the only right
that they are at present capable of enjoying.

Then, again, almost every direct application of the
Equality principle involves the tacit assumption
that the legislator has at his command a definite
quantity of happiness or good which he can distribute
at his pleasure. A moment's reflection shows that it
is never " Good " itself, but simply the conditions of
Good, that are capable of being " distributed," either
by the State or by a private individual. Nothing
that can possibly be distributed is a good under all
circumstances or to all persons. There is no Paradise
that some people would not contrive to turn into a
Hell even for themselves. It is obvious that equal
conditions of well-being will not produce equal
amounts of actual well-being to persons of differing
mental and bodily constitution. The devotee of
Equality as a practical watch-word will probably say,
" Let the conditions be equally distributed ; for the
rest, the individual must take care of himself." Such
a rule of conduct would violate the principle of
Equality of Consideration. The difficulty may be
seen most clearly if we take one of the lowest kinds
of good a good the external conditions of which
really are capable of " distribution " to an extent
which is rarely the case with higher kinds of good.
It will hardly be denied that different people require

GODANDMAN

different amounts of food. Put aside subjective
differences due to habit, education, and so on, and
it will remain true that the same amount and quality
of food will produce very different amounts both of
immediate sensual gratification and of ultimate
bodily well-being to men of different races, or even
to different individuals of the same race. It is
obvious to my mind that if meals were served out by
the State, the ideal would be to give equal attention
to the health and pleasure of each, not to serve out
to all a ration which would be repletion to A and
leave B unsatisfied. On the other hand, it would be
equally inconsistent with our principle to say that
everybody must have his hunger or appetite equally
satisfied, regardless of the fact that the community
has to do twice as much work to satisfy A as to
satisfy B, although (it may be) A's contribution to
the general good is no greater than B's. That might,
of course, be quite right and fair, provided that the
labour thus imposed upon the community was only
such as was conducive to the well-being of each.
But the moment this labour becomes an evil or an
abatement of the well-being of B, C, D, etc., this
inconvenience has just as much right to be considered
as the inconvenience occasioned to A by a somewhat
inadequate realisation of his capacity for food.
Suppose that one man in every four requires an
amount of extra food which would involve an hour's
extra work to each of the four. If an hour's extra
work to three men be an inconvenience of exactly the
.same negative value as an inadequate meal to one, 1
the two inconveniences ought to be of exactly equal
account to the legislator. The ideal legislator would
order that all should bear their fair share of the
inconvenience, i.e. that each should work half an
hour extra, and that the man with the abnormal
appetite should receive exactly half of that extra

1 i.e. the inconvenience of the inadequate meal minus the gain to him
of being spared the extra hour's work which he would share with the
others.

152

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

amount of food which would fully content him. The
bare statement of such problems is sufficient to show
the hopeless impossibility of giving full expression to
any ideal of absolute justice in actual social arrange-
ments ; but our theory, as a theory, is found not
incapable of meeting the difficulty, and ideals may
be none the less useful because it is recognised that
only distant approximations to them are feasible.

When we come to the higher sources of human
pleasure or, if we admit goods which are not capable
of being expressed in terms of pleasure, the higher
kinds of human good it is still more glaringly
obvious that men's capacity for such goods vary
enormously, and that it is only the conditions of
them, not the goods themselves, that are capable of
*' distribution/' We assuredly should not effect an
-equal distribution of aesthetic enjoyment by subject-
ing every citizen to a uniform course of artistic
training. And were the fullest opportunity afforded
of following the bent indicated by the varying
capacities of each, it would still be as far as ever
from realising our ideal of equal enjoyment for all.
Whether we look to the actual intensity of enjoy-
ment or to the intellectual or moral worth of the
good which we seek to distribute, it will still remain
true that men's capacities for such goods vary
enormously. They vary partly, of course, on account
of the use which men voluntarily make of the
opportunities placed within their reach, partly on
account of the physical and mental endowments for
which nobody supposes them to be " responsible."
The first source of inequality will become important
when we come to examine the feasibility of the ideal
of Just Recompense. For our present purpose,
however, it may be ignored ; it is enough that equal
distribution has to meet the difficulty that men's
capacities of receiving the thing to be distributed are
not equal. This is, however, a point which it is
unnecessary to labour, since the fact will be readily

153

2.

GOD AND MAN

admitted. It will possibly, however, be contended
that here the ideal is equality of Opportunity. I
should be far from denying the great practical value,
within certain limits, of this ideal : though, after the
admirable article of Mr. Leslie Stephen 1 it will be
unnecessary to show the impracticability of a literal
realisation of that ideal. But from a theoretical
point of view, the ideal itself is open to exactly the
same objections as the ideal of equal distribution
when applied to so gross and concrete a matter as
food. The English navvy would not be given an
equal opportunity of making the most of his life by
an allowance of food which would seem wanton
superfluity to a Russian moujik or an Indian ryot.
Equally far removed from the ideal of just distribu-
tion would it be to furnish equal educational oppor-
tunities to the dullard and the genius. Here it
would, indeed, be difficult to say on which side the
inequality would lie. The dullard might want three
times the attention that the genius would require in
learning to read : while the genius will require for
the realisation of his capacities an education which
the dullard is quite incapable of utilising. In either
case an individual would be getting much more than
his equal share of the distributable goods of the
community. For though the man who is not capable
of profiting by it may be said to " enjoy " the
opportunity as much as the man who is, this is of
course a mere facon de parley. The opportunity is
no more a good to the man to whom nature has
denied the capacity for using it than a pair of
spectacles is a good to a blind man. And if the
ideal of equal distribution as applied to actual goods
be boldly given up and the ideal of equal opportunity
substituted for it, we must ask whither the amend-
ment will carry us. The change of front, if it is to
be executed in a thorough-going manner, will involve

1 Leslie Stephen's essay on " Social Equality" in Social Rights and
Duties, vol. i, is here intended. Cp. The Theory of Good and Evil, i. 230 n.
- Their varying capacity for work is not here to the point.

154

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

the elimination from the inequalities which we are
to ami at equalising all those which are due to the
inequality of nature's- bounty. In that case we shall
have satisfied our duty to the idiot by giving him
every advantage that we offer to the sane man, while
we shall refuse to violate our ideal of equal oppor-
tunity by providing him with asylums and keepers,
which the sane man does not want. The distinction
between men of different race, between the sexes,
between the sick and the whole, will have to be
equally ignored. 1 The consequence seems preposter-
ous : but there is.no way out of it. One of two
things : either we must try to neutralize natural
differences of capacity, in which case more than an
even share of opportunity must be given to those to
whom nature has been ungenerous ; or we must
"ignore differences of natural capacity, in which case
we abandon the ideal of equal opportunity.

It will now be asked, How is the difficulty to be
met on the view hitherto maintained ? Theoretically
our formula is still equal to the emergency. As in
the case of the abnormal eater, we must regard the
disadvantage inflicted by the extra demands of the
abnormal intellect or abnormal physique as of
exactly equal value to the evil which the attempt to
compensate for the abnormality will inflict on each
member of the community. It might seem that
even on that principle, the idiot and the incurable
would have a bad time. If labour were to be
regarded as a mere curse, if sympathetic suffering
were to be regarded as mere dead loss to those who
suffer it, if real self-sacrifice sacrifice of pleasure or
comfort or ease by individuals or communities in

1 Another more formidable difficulty arises if we extend our view to
inequalities not of physical constitution but of physical circumstance.
If every member of society or of every local community is to have the full
benefit of superior soil, climate, etc., we have Capitalism at once. On the
other hand, we might ask the Socialist who aims at Equality whether he
is really prepared to give to the Laplander as much extra advantage as
would compensate him for not living in the Riviera, or to penalise the
inhabitant of the Riviera to an extent which would put him on a level
even with the Londoner ?

155

GOD AND MAN

the tending of the sick or the mentally afflicted 1
were to be regarded as simply so much deduction
from the community's total Good, then no doubt
a rigorous application of the principle of Equal
Consideration might involve a much more drastic
sacrifice of the individual to the community than
common humanity would approve. It is because
humanity is itself a good, that (upon my view of the
nature of Ultimate Good) the principle of Equal
Consideration would lead to no such consequences.

How far the principle of Equal Consideration
requires an unequal distribution of actual Goods is a
practical question which I do not desire here to
discuss. The existing distribution of good things is,
of course, just as far removed from an equal distribu-
tion of actual Good as it is from an equal distribution
of the conditions or opportunities of well-being.
Whether, on the principle of Equal Consideration, a
particular step towards greater Equality ought to
be promoted or resisted, will depend upon the
question whether, under existing conditions things
being what they are, human nature being what it is,
and so on the change will be in the interest of all,
the interest of each being regarded as of exactly
equal importance. In practice it may no doubt be
exceedingly difficult to balance the advantage of a
greater production of Well-being on the one hand,
and of a more equal distribution of it on the other.
It is probable that sometimes a smaller production
of Good must be accepted as a condition of greater
Equality, or, rather, we should have to face that
consequence if we assumed that an unHmited accu-
mulation of external goods added to the well-being
of their possessors. But, on the other hand, it is
almost obvious that some inequality is a necessary
condition of Well-being. That Equality of Con-
sideration would be violated by immediate attempts

1 1 exclude the young and the old, because this^amount of attention is
normally required by all.

156

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

at forcible and sudden social reconstruction will be
generally admitted. But that is not all. A certain
liberty of action is, and always will be, a condition
of Well-being; and liberty of action implies in-
equality. It implies some power of appropriating to
one's-self the results of one's own activity, or of
disposing of them to others. Granted that necessary
work might be parcelled out by the State, it is
difficult to see how rational beings could occupy their
leisure in an agreeable manner without a power of
voluntarily disposing of their activities in such a way
as to constitute an inequality of enjoyment, either
for themselves or for persons immediately dependent
upon them or favoured by them. And it is impos-
sible that those inequalities should not be the parent
of other inequalities. The man who has been
benefited by association with a man of exceptional
talent or learning or skill, will pass on his exceptional
advantages to others. A town which has been
blessed with inhabitants of exceptional energy and
character will enjoy advantages which the State
could not possibly transfer to others, though it might
make it its business artificially to destroy them.
Indeed, a logical application of the principle of
Equality would involve the enforcement of the
seminary maxim " Pas d'amities particulieres." At
what point the attempt to realise equality ceases to
be on the whole productive of a greater probability
of Good for each, is a practical question which
experience only will enable us to decide. I merely
want to point out (i) That some Inequality is a
condition of Well-being ; (2) That it is an assumption
that Socialism would realise a greater practicable
Equality than now exists in the only sense in which
Equality admits of philosophical defence Equality
of Consideration : that is an Equality that is always
practicable, since we can always (ideally) give each
individual equal consideration in making up our
minds whether this or that will be on the whole for

157

GOD AND MAN

the general good. The principle of Equal Considera-
tion certainly requires us to aim at greater Equality
of actual Well-being, but only on condition that the
greater Equality mil not violate the equal right of
each to enjoy as much good as it is possible for him
to enjoy.

So far I have been able to contend that obvious
objections to the principle of Equality do not really
form an objection to the principle of Equal Con-
sideration to the doctrine that each man is entitled
to an equal consideration at the hands of the com-
munity, though the result of such equal consideration,
under given conditions, may be an exceedingly un-
equal distribution of actual goods. But now I have
to meet a difficulty which is less easy of even a
theoretical solution.

It has already been indicated incidentally that it
is not only the less than normal capacity, but also
the more than normal capacity of exceptional
persons, that may impose upon the community
unequal sacrifices to enable them to attain an equal
level of well-being. Let us look at the difficulty in
its least serious form. The number of persons
capable of the highest intellectual cultivation and of
enjoying the good incidental to some high cultiva-
tion, is unquestionably a small minority. If such
goods are to be enjoyed at all, they can only be
enjoyed by the few ; and yet to give these few the
opportunity of such cultivation imposes upon .the
community sacrifices of inferior good (such good as
can be enjoyed by all) quite out of proportion to the
number of those for whom the sacrifice is made. It
may be contended, of course, that the extra value
of the services of such persons to the community is
well worth the social cost involved in their long years
of unproductive education or preparation, the num-
ber of persons and (it may be) materials employed
in giving that education, the waste which (on any
conceivable system of selection) will be incurred by

158

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

the education of persons who eventually turn out
to be unfitted for the highest work, and so on. So
long as that is the case we no doubt escape the
difficulty by our formula of equal consideration.
These favoured persons may be allowed advantages
which the many do not enjoy ; but it is good for
each member of the community that they should
enjoy them. Once again, equality of consideration
itself demands a departure from equal distribution.
In this way our difficulty is fairly met, so long as we
confine our attention to such higher kinds of culture
and resulting well-being as are of obvious social
utility. But when we come to what (though I dis-
like the word) must, I suppose, be called " the
higher culture," the case is different. It is greatly
to be feared that the cost of " higher culture " to the
community must always be considerable. It may be
doubted whether there is not a kind of culture which
demands for its vitality the existence of a class
invested with something more than an equal share of
all that makes life pleasant and attractive, and that
relieves from sordid cares and gives room for the
free expansion of individuality a class with a good
deal of leisure (at least in youth), a good deal of
freedom, with an education of the kind that can only
be kept alive as an hereditary tradition. 1 But of
course such a class can only be maintained by
enormous waste. The leisure will be wasted in a
large proportion of cases ; the liberty will be abused ;
the freedom to do with one's life what one pleases
without justifying it to the rest of the community,
will, in a majority of cases, be used to do with one's
life what cannot be justified. Only a small propor-
tion of these favoured individuals will do enough

1 This view is unaffected by the fact that, where this class exists, indivi-
dual members (often the highest intellects) may come from the classes
outside it. They enter into and appropriate the tradition which is kept
alive by the favoured class. And it is, of course, superfluous to remark
that by this favoured class I do not merely or primarily mean the Aris-
tocracy or the Plutocracy, but a class enjoying as an hereditary possession
a more than average measure of wealth or opportunity.

I 59

GOD AND MAN

fully to justify their superior advantages. It may
be said, indeed, that a socialistic and communistic
community might devise means for keeping alive
such a class if its social value be adequate to the
cost it involves. But, granted for the present this
social value, what is the probability of a whole
community, organised on principles of pure equality
and accustomed to exert in all departments implicit
obedience to its collective will, recognising the value
of such " culture " ? That, of course, is a practical
question which does not necessarily touch our theory.
If such a community would not recognise the value
of a class which is essential to the highest social
well-being, then to that extent Socialism is wrong,
and all attempts at greater equality of social con-
ditions must be stopped at the point at which the
existence of this class begins to be endangered, on
the principle of Equal Consideration itself. So far,
so good. But all this is assuming the social value of
the class. And yet may there not be a point at
which the benefits of " culture " cease to be capable
of very wide diffusion ? Is it possible to prove,
either a priori or a posteriori, that there may not be
a final irreconcilability between the higher well-
being of the few and the lower well-being of the
many ? 1 Many will be disposed to brush aside the
objection somewhat contemptuously. They will be
disposed to say, " Yes, there is a certain exquisite
polish of life which probably is not capable of wide
diffusion, which demands the existence of a few
favoured families with estates, and dividends, and
many roomed houses. It is probable that any
socialistic or semi-socialistic community that the

1 1 mean merely that something must be taken off from the lower
well-being of the many, not that the condition of the many must be made
an absolutely undesirable one. It might be, of course, contended that it
was actually good that men of lower capacities should enjoy less than the
possible amount of the lower goods (eating, drinking, etc.). On this view
the difficulty will disappear, but this position postulates that all who are
capable of it have the opportunity of entering the favoured class. And
this is just what no artificial arrangement seems capable of securing.

160

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

most sanguine f of sane imaginations could look
forward to, would seriously diminish the present
expenditure upon professors and libraries in the
German Empire. There would be less ' research ' on
matters but remotedly connected with life. Fewer
monographs would be published. Emendations
would not flourish. Latin verse-making would lose
the high market value which it still commands in
this country. There would be even a general lower-
ing of the standard of Greek and Latin scholarship.
Those who would still study Greek and Latin would
have to be content with knowing those languages,
say, rather better than even learned men are now
content to know French and German. And there
would be fewer people to take an interest in Aldine
editions or old china. But all this is of very little
weight of very little weight even for the serious
intellectual interests of humanity at large. To urge
such matters as a grave objection to any policy
which would bring us a step nearer the social millen-
nium, is like justifying Egyptian bondage because
without it, in all probability, the modern globe-
trotter would have had to eliminate the pyramids
from his programme."

Personally, I should have a good deal of sympathy
with such a reply, though I may feel less confident
than our candid Socialist that the vulgarising rust,
which might be the price of a real advance towards
social equality, would stop at the mere polished
surface of our intellectual life. But so far we are
contemplating comparatively trifling differences of
intellectual level say, the difference between the
intellectual level of Berlin and that of a third-rate
American University in the far West. But now
suppose it were possible, by some scheme of social
reconstruction, to win for the great mass of European
society the social and economic conditions which
may be attained by some socialistic American
brotherhood, but at the cost of extinguishing all

L 161

GOD AND MAN

Science, all Literature, all Art, all intellectual
activity which rises above the highest level known
in such communities. That might possibly repres-
ent, even on the intellectual side taken alone, a
higher kind of life than is now lived by the vast
majority even of European humanity. The extinc-
tion of the " higher culture " could not, therefore, be
resisted on the ground of the diffused influence upon
the community of the small cultivated class. If the
question be asked whether I should as a fact resist
such a social revolution as I have contemplated in
the interests of the higher culture, I answer, " If the
programme included the bringing of human society
up to the moral level of a Moravian mission settle-
ment, I certainly should not lift a finger to prevent
it. If we confine our attention merely to the general
diffusion of a low material comfort, a dull content-
ment, and an education ranging between that of the
Sunday School and that of the Mechanics' Institute,
I should be in great doubt and perplexity. I should
certainly doubt whether I could doom the world to
a continuance of our present social horrors, although
the change might lead to the evanescence of research
and speculation, sweetness and light, full and varied
exercise of the faculties, and all the rest of it." Of
course I do not assert for one moment that such an
alternative is now, or ever will be, in its naked
simplicity, presented to the social reformer. In the
long run (putting aside the influence of exceptional
outbursts of religious excitement) I think it probable
that moral and intellectual progress are intimately
connected. All I wish to point out is, that it is easy
enough to conceive circumstances in which we might
have to choose between the wide diffusion of a lower
kind of well-being and a much narrower diffusion of
a higher kind of life. At least in the intellectual
sphere, there is a higher life which, if it exists at all,
can only exist for the comparatively few, and which,
under certain circumstances, may be purchaseable

162

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

only by sacrifices on the part of the many which are
not compensated by any appreciable advantage to
that many. If under such conditions, we pronounce
that the higher life ought not to be extinguished, then
we do at last depart from the principle of Equal
Consideration.

In the cases already contemplated, some will
perhaps doubt whether the principle should be
sacrificed or not. I will now mention a case in
which probably no one will hesitate. It is becoming
tolerably obvious at the present day that all improve-
ment in the social condition of the higher races of
mankind postulates the exclusion of competition
with the lower races. That means that, sooner or
later, the lower well-being it may be the very
existence of countless Chinamen or negroes must
"be sacrificed that a higher life may be possible for a
much smaller number of white men. It is impossible
to defend the morality of such a policy upon the
principle of Equal Consideration. If we defend it,
we distinctly adopt the principle that higher life is
intrinsically, in and for itself, more valuable than
lower life, though it may only be attainable by fewer
persons, and may not contribute to the greater good
of those who do not share it.

I will only add a case which calls still more in-
disputably for the application of the same principle.
When we say, " Every one to count for one," we are
no doubt thinking merely of human beings ; but
why are the animals to be excluded from considera-
tion ? I, for one, should be prepared to say that in
the abstract they ought to be included. Their pain
seems to me an evil possibly as great an evil as
equal pain in human beings : their comfort or
pleasure has a value to which every humane person
will make some sacrifices. But few people would be
disposed to spend money in bringing the lives of
fairly-kept London cab-horses up to the standard of
comfort represented by a brewer's dray-horse, in

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GOD AND MAN

preference to spending it on the improvement of the
higher life of human beings. The lives of animals
cannot be thus lightly treated except upon a prin-
ciple which involves the admission that the life of
one man may be more valuable than the life of
another, on account of its greater potentialities
apart altogether from the social utilities which may
be involved in their realisation.

No demonstrative proof can, as it appears to me,
be given that the higher good of few and the lower
good of many may not come into collision. And
when they do come into collision, there are some
cases in which we should, I think, prefer the higher
good of the few ; but I know of no theoretical
principle by which it is possible to govern our choice..
We have two self-evident maxims : (i) Seek the
highest good ; (2) Seek the most equal possible
distribution of good : and there is no formula for
reconciling the two, that I know of, which will be
completely applicable to all cases. We may, indeed,,
save the universal applicability of our rule of Equal
Consideration, but it is only by reducing it to its
most abstract form. We may still say that every
one is to count for one so long as all we know about
him is that he is one. We may still say, " Cceteris
paribus, every one is to count for one." But, then,,
this will amount to the assertion, " Every one is to
count equally, so long as he is equal ; but the capac-
ity for a higher life may be a ground for treating men
unequally." To what extent this principle should
be carried, it is impossible to define. It will obvi-
ously go but a very little way towards the permanent
justification of existing social inequalities, unless it
is contended that such inequalities can only be
removed by remedies which are worse than the
disease ; but, on the other hand, it does, I think,
forbid us to make absolute equality in the participa-
tion of good part even of our ultimate social ideal.

While I know of no means of effecting a completely

164

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

satisfactory reconciliation between the principles of
Maximum Good and of Equal Distribution, there are
:some considerations which will, I think, very largely
prevent the necessity of choosing between them in
practical life. While we cannot theoretically demon-
strate that the best sort of life (in the intellectual
region) will always extend its benefits over the whole
social organism, we may find an ample justification
for promoting the higher culture of the few in the
ultimate results of such higher culture to the com-
munity generally. The principle of Election has a
place in Ethics and Politics as well as in Theology.
It is often right for governments and for individuals
to bestow much more than their fair share of atten-
tion upon the few on account of the ultimate value
to society of there being such a higher class. We are,
in fact, applying once more the principle that, in the
^qual distribution of good, future generations have
their share as well as the present. It is probable
that, in the then condition of the world, Athenian
culture and Athenian democracy were impossible
without slavery. It would perhaps be hard to show
that the actual slaves of the time were much better
off for the intellectual and the political life in which
they had no share ; but it would not be too much to
say that in the forces which have ultimately banished
.slavery from Europe and America, in the forces to
which the modern democratic movement owes its
existence, that Hellenic city-life of which slavery was
the foundation is no unimportant factor. On the
same principle, we might justify our indifference to
the welfare of the Chinese, when it collides with the
higher well-being of a much smaller European
population, by the consideration that if the higher
life is ever to become possible for China, it can only
be through the maintenance and progress of a higher
race. Such considerations will, I believe, practically
prevent the necessity of our actually claiming for a
smaller class any social expenditure (so to speak) but

165

GOD AND MAN

what can ultimately be repaid to the society (though
not to the actual persons) which make that well-
being possible. Since, however, the repayment is
made to future generations, it supplies no ground for
assuming that a communistic community would be
at all likely to recognise the importance of such an
expenditure.

It may be well, perhaps, to summarise the con-
clusions which I have endeavoured to establish.

(1) It is a self-evident truth that in the distribution
of ultimate good every one should count for one, and
nobody for more than one. This is the ideal of
Justice.

(2) The equal distribution of concrete good things
would produce unequal amounts of actual well-being,
and would therefore not be just. Hence neither the
equal distribution of property rights nor perfect
equality of opportunity would satisfy the require-
ments of ideal Justice.

(3) The equal distribution even of the conditions
of well-being would often produce a low actual
amount of good to be distributed, and would con-
sequently violate the equal right of others. Hence
the equality can only be equality of consideration
in the distribution of Good. Practically this con-
sideration must involve inequality in actual distribu-
tion.

(4) Many of the objections to making Equality of
Consideration our ideal may be met by recognising
the rights of future generations as well as of the
present.

(5) While the enjoyment by some of such good as,
from the nature of the case, cannot be enjoyed by
all is usually for the good of all, and hence justified
by the principle of equal consideration, it is impos-
sible to show that this will always be the case.
Individuals, or races, with higher capacities (i.e..
capacities for a higher sort of well-being) have a
right to more than merely equal consideration with

166

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF EQUALITY

those of lower capacities. Hence the formula,
" Every one to count for one/' etc., requires the
addition of " cceteris paribus," or " so long as he is
of equal capacity for the highest kind of life."

(6) In practice, it may, however, usually be
assumed that the realisation of such superior capac-
ities by those who possess them, is for the ultimate
good of the human race.

I have, so far, left out of account altogether all
strictly moral differences between man and man. I
have left out of account the question whether the
share of good to be allotted to each man, or rather
(as we have seen) his share of consideration in the
distribution of good, ought ever to be more than
another's, on account either (from one point of
view) of his greater contribution to the common
good, or (from another) his greater virtue or merit.
An answer to this question will practically amount to
a discussion of the second of the formulae which
purport to be an adequate expression of social
justice the formula, " To every one according to
his work." This discussion I must reserve for an-
other article. Meanwhile, I must ask the reader
who has followed me through this somewhat abstract
and technical discussion, to bear in mind that I am
compelled to leave at present a very incomplete
representation of my views.

167

VII

WHAT IS JUSTICE?*
II. THE THEORY OF REWARD

IN the previous article I attempted an examination
of one of the current views of Ideal Justice, the view
embodied in the Benthamite dictum, " Everybody
to count for one, nobody for more than one." Admit-
ting the a priori validity of the axiom, I attempted
to show that the only sense in which this equality
could rationally be understood, is as an equality of
consideration, which would necessarily result except
under conditions which there is no reason for antici-
pating in an actual inequality of all concrete
advantages which are capable of being " distri-
buted," whether by the State or by private
individuals. Seeking to meet the further question,
whether capacity for a higher kind of life, or
EvSaipovla, did not constitute a ground for greater
consideration, I contended that this was certainly
the case, though save in exceptional cases, where
the disparity was very great I did not admit the
practical probability of our ever being obliged to
treat the higher well-being of the few as of more
importance than the lower well-being of the many,
since the development of higher potentialities in the
few may usually be assumed to be for the ultimate
good of the many. Still to make our formula
scientifically accurate, I contended that it required
to be put into the amended form, " Cceteris paribus,
everybody to count for one, nobody for more than
one." Throughout the article, however, I neglected
all such differences between man and man as are due
to diversities of moral worth. Whether such diver-
sities ought to be looked upon as ground for
exceptional consideration in the ultimate distribu-
tion of the conditions of well-being, is the question

1 Reprinted from the Economic Review, Vol. II, pp. 161-178 (April, 1892).

168

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

which I propose to discuss in the present paper.
That such superiority is a ground for exceptional
consideration, is what is asserted by the rival defini-
tion of Justice, which assumes the form, " To every
man according to his work," or "To every man
according to his merit."

Although, on a superficial view, these two formulae
might be accepted as practically identical, there is
really a fundamental difference between them. We
may either say that society ought to reward the
individual according to the intrinsic or objective
value to itself of the work produced by his labour or
activity, or we may say that every one should be
considered in proportion to the merit which he shows
in doing that work. Reward if that is the term
employed is in the first case understood in an
-economic, in the second in a moral, sense. A
moment's consideration will show that the two
interpretations would lead to essentially different
results. A picture painted with the toes by a
handless man may show much more zeal, industry,
perseverance, and the like, as well as more skill and
ability, than one painted in the usual way. If the
two pictures were of equal artistic worth, the
painters ought, according to the first formula, to be
rewarded equally ; while, according to the second,
the toe-painter should receive, it may be, ten or
twenty times the reward of the hand-painter. And
this is by no means an extreme illustration of the
divergent consequences of the two methods : it is
hardly possible to exaggerate the difference between
the maximum and the minimum of human talent,
skill, strength, or other capacity, which determines
the quantity and value of the results produced by a
.given amount of labour. Let us, then, examine the
economic interpretation of our thesis first.

The theory that ideal Justice means paying each
man in proportion to the value of his work to the
community looks plausible only so long as we forget

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GOD AND MAN

that economic value is essentially relative, and not
absolute. What we mean by the value of a given
thing is the amount of other things which will
actually be given for it under certain social condi-
tions. But when we are assuming that the very"
constitution of society has been, so to speak, put into
the melting-pot when we are given carte-blanche to
reconstruct human society in accordance with ideal
justice, all the usual means of ascertaining value
disappear. Our ordinary ideas of value postulate-
that wealth is divided among a number of indivi-
duals who, under whatever restrictions, are free to
barter one form of it for another. The value let us
say of medical attendance depends upon the
amount of other good things which people are
prepared to give up in exchange for medical attend-
ance, under such conditions as the following : (i)
that the numbers of the medical profession depend
upon the number of persons who are induced to
enter it by the advantages which it holds out, as
compared with other professions open to the same
class of persons ; (2) that the profession requires a
certain expenditure upon education ; and (3) that
this expenditure is only within the reach of a limited
number of persons who have themselves or their
parents accumulated a certain amount of wealth,
and become, to a limited extent, capitalists ; and so
on. I need not take further pains to show that
values, no less than prices, are fixed by competition.
The very instance which I have chosen is, indeed,
one of those in which prices are not wholly fixed by
competition ; and, just at the point at which they
cease to be fixed by competition (between different
classes of workers, if not between individual work-
men), we cease to be able to express the value of the
article supplied. It is customary with general
practitioners to regulate their fees by the wealth of
the patient, of which the probable rental of his house
is taken as a rough indication. Now, if patient A

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JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

pays ios., patient B pays 75. 6d., and patient C 55.,.
for a precisely similar visit, which fee represents the
true value of the commodity supplied ? This is a
question which it is obviously impossible to answer.
Now, in a community organised throughout upon a
non-competitive basis, it would be as impossible to
express in general terms the value of medical attend-
ance as compared with other things that have value,
as it is to express the true value of those particular
visits which are remunerated according to the wealth
of the patient. Value is ascertained by competition.
It implies that there is a limited supply of the
commodities in question, or at least a limited supply
of commodities in general, and that if you have one,
you can't have another. Now, medical attendance
is precisely a commodity for which there is a by no
means unlimited demand. A Socialistic State which
should determine the vocation of all its members, and
provide their whole education, might very conceiv-
ably secure medical attendance free for all its
citizens. Now, if everybody could have as much
medical attendance as he required without giving up
his share in any other commodity, it would be
clearly impossible to ascertain the economic value of
medical attendance to the community.

It may be said that these considerations would
cease to be applicable when the commodity is one
for which the demand is practically unlimited. The
case would not, indeed, be altered supposing the
State undertook to determine how much of each
commodity the worker should receive, and exchange
were made as criminal as accumulation. But what
if the worker were paid by tickets in the stores, and
each worker were allowed to take his day's allowance
in whatever form he pleased ? Two cases are then
supposable. The State would have to fix the
amount of one commodity which should be exchange-
able for another. If it undertook to estimate the
value of the article by reference to the amount of

171

GOD AND MAN

skill, knowledge, training, etc., which it took to
produce it, we must suppose the problem which we
are discussing already solved, since what we are in
search of is precisely some common denominator by
means of which to compare the value of watch-
making and the value of turnip-cultivation. If, on
the other hand (to avoid involving ourselves in a
logical circle), we assume that the quality of the
labour is to be neglected, the only criteria by which
it is possible to ascertain how much of one com-
modity ought to be served out as the equivalent of
so much of another will be (i) the amount of labour
expended on its production, (2) the amount of
capital required for its production. Now, capital is
resolvable into (i) the results of past labour, (2) land
and other natural constituents or products of the
soil. On the principle now contemplated, the worker
who was allowed to take his pay in beef or in bread
would, of course, have to choose between several
pounds of bread and one of beef, because it takes
more land to grow a pound of ox-flesh than to grow
a pound of flour. But this element in the relative
value of different commodities has, of course, nothing
to do with the value of the workman's work qua
work. Hence, the only way in which we can com-
pare the value of two pieces of work (on any
hypothesis) is by their respective amounts.

Even then our difficulties are not at an end.
What is amount of work ? Clearly not the time spent
on it ; for some kinds of work are harder than
others. But hardness is not by itself a reason for
additional remuneration, except in so far as harder
work is more disagreeable than lighter work. Some
very light kinds of work may become disagreeable
by reason of their extreme monotony ; while severe
bodily exercise is to some people a positive delight.
Hard work may, of course, become disagreeable
when pursued for such a length of time as would not
be disagreeable in the case of lighter work. But all

172

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

that the hard-worker can claim is that, in so far as
his work is more disagreeable than other work, he
shall be compensated for its disagreeableness, either
by liberty to work for fewer hours, or by other
advantages such as more food, tickets on stores,
etc. It is possible that some system might be
devised for comparing the relative disagreeableness
of work by ascertaining the amounts of each which
the average man would be willing to do for the same
remuneration, including under that term all the
advantages whether in leisure or food or other
conveniences by which a community might en-
deavour to equalise the conditions of workers in
different occupations. In that way it might be
possible to ascertain the quantity of work which
different commodities or services to the community
cost. And quantity of labour, in the sense explained,
is the only criterion by which we could measure the
relative value of different kinds of work.

Although this reasoning seems to me to be un-
answerable, it is probable that to some minds it will
be found too abstract to be satisfying. " What ! "
they will exclaim ; "do you mean to say that the
physician does not perform a greater service to
society than the ploughman ? Is he not therefore to
receive a proportionate reward ? Granted that the
destruction of competition would prevent your
measuring this relative value in terms of s. d., the
general sense of the community will surely be equal
to the task of appreciating the relative value of
different services, and will act according to its innate
sense of what is just or appropriate." I answer : Is
it so clear that the service of the physician is so
much more important than that of the ploughman ?
At present we measure their relative importance by
the comparative difficulty of getting them. But
with carte-blanche to postulate any form of society
that he chooses, the legislator would have no diffi-
culty in making it quite as easy to get medical

GOD AND MAN

attendance as to get bread. A sufficient number of
people will be educated as physicians to secure that
medical attendance will be forthcoming for every
man who wants it, and sufficient ploughmen will be
provided to supply everybody with as much bread
as he can eat. And, when these two conditions are
secured, no further production either of bread or of
medical attendance will be of the slightest value to
the community. 1 If you can have enough of both,
it is impossible to say which is the most valuable.
If you ask which is the most valuable when you
cannot have enough of both, it must be admitted
that the ploughman performs the more indispensable
service. Some of us would die or suffer without the
physician : but we should all die without the plough-
man or some equivalent food-producer. If, then,
this is the sense which you put upon the principle
'" To every man according to his work/" I must insist
that the ploughman shall be paid more than the
physician. But, for my own part, I cannot see the
justice of the principle thus interpreted. The
physician would naturally say to the State, " If I
had known that I was to be served like that, I should
have wanted to be a ploughman too. And if you,
for your greater convenience, insisted that I should
be a physician, why should I suffer on that account ?
You say, ' Bread is more necessary than medical
attendance ; ' but if you did not want to have
both, you should not have insisted on my being a
physician."

It is evident that the real consequences of following
out this maxim, " Every man according to his work,"
would be very different from those usually intended
by its advocates. When they do not mean that
equal work should be paid by equal advantages, they
usually assume that what is commonly considered
the higher work, that which employs the highest

1 Foreign trade being for greater simplicity ignored. If corn is ex-
ported, it is, of course, not serviceable to the community as bread.

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JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

faculties, intellectual work, artistic work, spiritual
work, etc., should be remunerated more highly than
the lower, more mechanical, more animal work.
Now, this contention may be based on one of two
grounds : either (i) on the ground that by such
work a higher service is performed to the community,
or (2) that the higher faculty should receive higher
remuneration simply because it is higher. In the
first case, I am unable to see the justice of the
demand. The man who prints Bibles no doubt
renders a higher service to the community than the
man who prints " penny dreadfuls." But, assuming
that both minister to legitimate social needs, nobody
proposes that the former should receive higher
remuneration than the latter. So long as the
different values spring from some difference in the
mere objective results of work, nobody will contend
that the more important or " higher " consequences
should form a ground for unequal reward of exactly
the same work. If you say, " The work itself is
different, not merely its external consequences," I
cannot see how there can be a difference in kind
between one work and another when abstracted both
(i) from the results to the community and (2) from
the faculties employed on the work. If you mean
to insist upon the last, then you adopt the second of
our two original alternatives which we have yet to
examine.

Is the superior dignity the moral or aesthetic or
intellectual superiority of the activities employed
any ground for additional remuneration ? Of course,
if intellectual work is considered more disagreeable
than unintellectual, then the work ought to receive
compensating advantages. But it is not the common
opinion that to intellectual persons intellectual work
is less agreeable than manual labour or mechanical
drudgery. Most people would probably say,
" Cceteris paribus, the intellectual work is infinitely
the more pleasant." Even if we suppose the

175

GOD AND MAN

conditions of intellectual and manual labour equalised,
there would probably be more persons anxious to
undertake intellectual instead of manual work than
the community could find adequate employment for.
For our present purpose, however, it is enough to
negative any claim for additional remuneration on
the ground of additional disagreeableness. If, how-
ever, the intellectual work is supposed to imply a
sort of merit on the part of the worker, and to claim
remuneration on that score, one must ask, " To
what does the intellectual worker owe the oppor-
tunity of doing this higher work ? " The answer
will be, (i) partly to superior education and oppor-
tunities, (2) partly, in the case of the higher kinds of
intellectual work, to the possession of natural
capacities which are confined to a more or less small
proportion of the human race. Now, in so far as the
position of the brain-worker is due to education, it
is clearly not his merit but the organisation of
society which has put him in this position. Under
present conditions, it is in the long run the possession
of capital that secures education ; and, the capital
expended upon education being nearly always accu-
mulated by others than the person whom it benefits,
it will hardly be pretended that an accident of this
kind can claim remuneration on grounds of abstract
justice, however expedient it may be as a means to
the general good under certain conditions that such
remuneration should be given. And under altered
social arrangements the community could, of course,,
easily secure that the requisite educational advan-
tages should be given to as many persons as its social
need might demand. In either case, there is no
question of superior merit in the intellectual worker.
But how does the matter stand with regard to
those capacities for higher work which are due to
Nature ? Nature has given to most Englishmen
intellectual powers possessed by very few negroes.
Among Englishmen she has made, perhaps, some

176

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

two or three per cent, capable, with the requisite
education and opportunity and application, of
obtaining a first-class in litterae humaniores at
Oxford to take the distribution of one particular
kind of intellectual capacity as a sample of the
comparative rarity of high intellectual powers. And
when we come to the highest kind of intellectual
capacity, she gives originality to one man in a
thousand, genius to half a dozen in a generation, and
so on. But should the possession of capacities for
doing the precise kind of work which only a certain
number of his fellow-countrymen can do should
even the power to do (as, of course, is the case with
even the most modest kind of originality) the par-
ticular thing which no one else living can do, con-
stitute ground for superior remuneration ? The
question is, I confess, not an easy one. So long as
the question is considered merely as one of " reward '*
of some additional gratification, having no relation
or connection with the exercise of the superior
faculty of the superior person I must say that I
cannot see the justice of this extra remuneration.
Everybody would admit that the mere rarity of a
capacity would be no ground for exceptional treat-
ment ; though, of course, the most mechanical and
accidental kind of superiority (e.g. delicacy of touch
enabling a man to test grain better than anybody
else) may, under a competitive regime, enable a man
to appropriate an enormous share of the world's
wealth. For instance, let us suppose that a com-
munity, for the purpose of some pageant, wishes to
employ a man who shall exactly fit a particular
medieval suit of armour. The suit is so narrow in
proportion to its other dimensions that not one in a
thousand modern men, strong enough to bear its
weight on horseback, can get into it. Is there any
reason, on principles of ideal justice, why the one
man who happens to fit the armour to perfection
should be paid more than whatever would be

M 177

GOD AND MAN

considered fair remuneration to an average man for a
day's appearance in a new suit of armour specially
constructed for himself ? Is the case any different
because the qualification is not merely rare but
intellectually or artistically or even putting aside
the questions of will morally admirable ? Should
strength of brain entitle a man to a superior share of
the good things of this life, any more than strength
of arm ? If a man has a body of extraordinary size or
strength, it is right that I should look upon him
not, indeed, with the feeling of awe or respect which
in our present rudimentary stage of civilisation is
inspired in most of us by the feeling that under
certain circumstances such a man might assault us
with impunity, but with the feelings of wonder and
interest which are inspired by an elephant or a fossil
mammoth. If he has extraordinary skill, and agility
of body, it is right that I should look upon him with
the half-sesthetic, half-sympathetic feeling that is
inspired by the sight of a gazelle or a greyhound.
So far it is nature, not man, that I am contemplating.
If he has exceptional brain-power, the imagination
of a poet or the penetration of a philosopher, it is
right that I should treat him with respect, i.e. the
intellectual respect that his qualities merit. If he
has moral qualities above those of common men,
then it is right that I should treat him with moral
and spiritual respect that I should listen to and
weigh his moral and spiritual counsels with a view
to the improvement of my own character and con-
duct, just as I pay attention to the poet and the
philosopher with a view to the culture of my imagina-
tion or my intellect. But I see no reason why, on
account of either the intellectual or the spiritual
superiority, I should offer him a bottle of champagne
while for my less gifted guest I only provide small
beer. Neither intellectual nor spiritual superiority
seems to me ground for assigning to a man a larger
share of carnal delights than his neighbour. The

178

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

opportunity of freely exercising his superior faculty
and the power or authority which his particular gift
fits him to wield, these strike us as the fitting re-
wards, and the only fitting rewards, for superiority
of this kind. To the man who is capable of a higher
kind of happiness than others because of his higher
gifts, that higher happiness itself surely is the due
reward not a larger meed than others of those
lower kinds of pleasure of which alone his inferiors
are capable. If any difference were to be made
between the two, it might be plausibly argued that
the superior man should receive less of those lower
pleasures which he ought better to be able to do
without, than the man who is capable of nothing
else. To translate this somewhat abstract language
into terms of actual social arrangements, justice does
not seem to me to require that because Nature has
given a man capacities which fit him for superior
usefulness to the community, his work per hour
should be paid at a higher rate than the equally
exhausting or disagreeable work of common men. 1
When I say " paid at a higher rate," I mean that
there is no reason why he should be better fed,
clothed, or housed ; that he should be indulged in
more or more expensive amusements, or allowed
longer holidays.

No doubt it is quite true that the man of higher
faculty requires for the exercise of those faculties
certain external conditions of an exceptional char-
acter. And some of these conditions may consist in
a larger supply of those conveniences and indulgences
which ordinary men are quite capable of appreci-
ating. Nay, the higher faculty may sometimes be a
source, not of greater happiness, but of greater
misery, unless these conditions are forthcoming.

1 The fatigue of work demands remuneration only in so far as (i) it
makes it disagreeable, which it does not always do, or (2) makes the
worker capable of doing less of it. If, on account of the value of his work,
it is socially desirable that he should do a longer day's work than others,
then no doubt the absence of recreation should be made up to him in
other ways.

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GOD AND MAN

The musical genius, for instance, might be driven
distracted by being compelled to live amid the noise
and bustle, the barrel-organs and the hurdy-gurdies,
which would be Paradise to an East End factory-girl.
And of intellectual workers in general it may be said
that they do require for the favourable exercise of
their faculties a larger share of certain comforts and
conveniences than would be likely to fall to the lot
of the average workmen under a regime of absolute
equality. I cannot see, indeed, that the luxurious
table of a successful barrister is any more conducive
to his activity than the humbler fare of the solicitor's
managing clerk, who does quite as large an allowance
of brain-work ; but it is probably true that the
brain-worker wants more and better food than is
absolutely necessary for the less exhausting kinds of
mechanical work. Still, if everybody had his fill of
plain and wholesome diet, I don't know that the
brain-worker could claim anything more. Nor is
there any reason in the nature of things existing
social conventionalities apart why the brain-worker
should be clad in broad-cloth, and the hard-worker
in corduroy. But it is otherwise when we come to
less material conveniences. It is probably desirable
that the higher-class brain-worker should be set free
from petty worries and anxieties. Under existing
conditions, we should say that he ought to be
allowed servants to do for him things which other
people have to do for themselves ; under any
arrangements he would want a larger amount of
service. It is desirable that he should have more
house-room than the most ideal Socialism would
probably assign to ordinary hand-workers. The
doctor's carriage is none the less a personal luxury
because it is also necessary to his business. The
author will want a study, the artist a studio, the
student books and room to stow them. If his wife
is to be capable of sharing his life, and not to be a
mere housekeeper, she must also be secured more

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JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

than the normal exemption from household drudgery
by nurses and other servants. And if family life is
to be maintained, it is practically inevitable that
some of these advantages should be extended to his
'children, who may nevertheless be very far from
inheriting his mental superiority. Then, too, it is
probable that if the lives of highly cultivated people
are to be made as agreeable to them as their lives are
to people of less cultivation, they will want amuse-
ments or interests that will impose upon the com-
munity a heavier tax than the amusements of the
less cultivated. We can hardly conceive of the most
absolutely socialistic State allowing very extensive
opportunities of foreign travel to every one ; and yet
it is clearly desirable that they should be within the
reach of some. Moreover, for the exercise of certain
mental gifts, considerable leisure and some liberty of
action may be essential including the liberty at
times to be unproductive. Literary production has,
indeed, at times, been stimulated by the most abject
bodily want ; but it is certain that the higher kinds
of intellectual labour could never be made into a
daily task, to be exacted under penalty of imprison-
ment or short commons by a socialistic taskmaster.
In ways like these it is desirable that the more gifted
man or even the more educated man when once
the community has allowed him a higher education
than the common should have exceptional treat-
ment. But it is rather because these things are
necessary or desirable for the full development and
enjoyment of his faculty, than as " reward " for
being differently constituted to ordinary men, that
he may rightfully claim from the community the
use in certain directions of more wealth than
would fall to his lot under a perfectly equal distribu-
tion.

The result of this examination of the dictum, " To
very man according to his work," has, so far, been
this that we can accept it only in the sense, " Higher

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GOD AND MAN

capacity ought to be provided with all the conditions
necessary to its exercise." And this was, it will be
remembered, the one exception which our examina-
tion in a previous article of the maxim, " Every-
body to count for one, and nobody for more than
one," compelled us to adopt before we could admit
its universal applicability in any sense other than
the purely abstract one, " Cceteris paribus, everybody
to count for one."

So far, however, we have confined our attention to
those differences in capacity for work which are due
solely to differences of natural endowment. But
now, what of the differences which are due to Will ?
What of the strictly moral differences ? Ought the
good to be rewarded ? What, in ultimate analysis,
are we to make of the popular notion of Merit ?
Here it is necessary to put aside two philosophical
problems with which a discussion of this question is
usually involved.

1. I put aside the question of Free-will. The
facts of heredity, the phenomena of mental patho-
logy, and the constancy of statistics make it plain
that free-will is on any view not the only cause of
some men's goodness and other men's badness. And
it is obviously impossible to discriminate between
the parts which undetermined choice may play in
the formation of actual good volitions, and the
factors in their causation which are due to other
influences. Hence it is clear that, if we are in any
sense to reward men for their goodness, we must
look only to the actual quality of their volitions.
We must reward them for being good without raising
the question how they came to be so.

2. The question suggests the theory of Punish-
ment. If punishment is retrospective and retribu-
tive, then it will naturally follow that reward must
also rest upon an a priori basis, and not be a means
to anything beyond itself. I have elsewhere dis-
cussed this question, and rejected the retributive

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JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

view of punishment, though admitting that much
important ethical truth is held in solution by it. 1 It
does not, however, follow that, because we refuse to
say that the bad man ought to suffer pain as an
end-in-itself, independently of the moral effect to be
produced upon him and others, we must, on that
account, decline to say that happiness ought to be
distributed in proportion to goodness. It is one
thing to cause a man pain, another to refuse to make
him happier than somebody else. When it is a
question of inflicting pain, the onus probandi, so to
speak, would seem to rest with the inflicter ; when
it is a question of distributing happiness, it may be
considered to lie with the claimants. If I hang, or
assault, or imprison a man, he naturally demands
my authority for doing so ; but it might easily be
maintained that I do no wrong to A by giving a
certain lot of happiness to B. The question is,
therefore, not settled by the view we take of the
theory of punishment. We must still ask, " Is it
reasonable that ail individual or a community, having
the conditions of happiness at his or its disposal,
should distribute them to all equally, or should
distribute them in proportion to the moral worth of
the individuals concerned ? " The obvious answer
is, that we shall of course distribute in accordance
with merit because we want to make as many people
good as possible, and that experience shows that the
best way of effecting that object is to contrive that,
so far as possible, goodness shall lead to happiness,
and badness to misery. 2 The question, whether,
apart from such tendency, justice would require an
unequal distribution of external goods, is so abstract

1 International Journal of Ethics, October, 1891. [Cp. also H. Rashdall,
The Theory of Good and Evil. Vol. I, cap. g.J DD.

2 If we hold that Virtue necessarily or intrinsically leads to Happiness
(given the favourable external conditions, or an unimpeded exercise, of
virtuous activities), the question ceases to have any meaning except in
relation to God, who may no doubt be conceived of as creating human
nature in such a way as to make goodness the true happiness of the crea-
ture ; but, in stating such a position, it would be necessary to guard against
the inference that virtue is made good only by the will of God.

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GOD AND MAN

a speculation that I may be excused from answering
it. It is a question which can never affect the solu-
tion of any practical problem even the speculative
solution of any imaginable practical problem.

It should be observed, indeed, that the grounds
on which we find the good entitled to reward will
by themselves set a limit to the amount of this
reward, in so far as it consists in the means of
gratifying the lower or more animal desires. It will
be generally admitted that the possession, or at least
the consumption, of much wealth in such ways is
not favourable to may even be inconsistent with
the highest moral well-being. And when the existing
inequalities are justified as a means to the encourage-
ment of " merit/' it is often forgotten that the
influence of excessive wealth upon the moral well-
being of its possessors is quite as injurious as its
influence in decreasing the moral and physical well-
being of the poor. If the question be raised, whether
the system of rewarding virtue is not itself injurious
to virtue, I should be quite prepared to admit that
the reward of virtue might conceivably be carried to
this point. And this is one of the difficulties that I
should feel in admitting, even as an abstract and
theoretical proposition, that the good man ought, as
a matter of a priori justice, to be rewarded in
proportion to his merit; since that would mean, if
we use words in their ordinary sense, that every
increase of virtue should, on principles of ideal
justice, bring with it a larger house, more servants,
better dinners, more expensive pleasures, more
.splendid equipages, and more costly horseflesh.

But how far is this principle, that the good ought
to be rewarded, available as a canon of distributive
justice in actual life ? For practical purposes not at
all. The only kind of goodness which society at
large has it in its power to reward is clearly such
contribution to social good as admits of being
expressed in terms of s. d. The only kind of

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JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

reward, in short, of which it is possible to take
practical account is the economic reward for work
done. For how is it possible to discriminate between
the portion of the work produced which is due to
superior good-will, to industry, perseverance, integ-
rity, and that which is due to superior capacity ? It
is obvious that one workman can do in an hour twice
as much work as another working equally hard.
But how can we test the intensity of a man's applica-
tion ? It is practically impossible to reward industry
-without rewarding cleverness also. And yet we have
seen that ideal justice is not satisfied by rewarding
.a man according to the actual quantity of work
done. The conclusion is, that, if there is to be any
diversity of reward at all, it cannot be based upon
the principle of ideal justice, but must be regulated
by social expediency. If anybody thinks that men
in general could be induced to put forth their
maximum activity in the service of the community
without the prospect of reward, for themselves and
those nearly connected with them, he is a person
with whom it is useless to argue. Rewards there
must be ; and yet rewards cannot be governed by
considerations of ideal justice.

The general result of our discussion I apprehend
to be to substitute in practice the inquiry, what is
the most generally expedient method of distribution
that is at present possible, for the attempt to realise
some ideally just method of distribution. By
expedient, I mean conducive to the highest well-being
of all. By generally expedient, I mean that which
will realise the greatest amount of good for each.
There is, therefore, no surrender of the position that
everybody is to count for one ; but it is the right of
every one to consideration in the estimate of what is
for the general advantage, not the right to an
actually equal share of any actual thing, which will
be implied in ' ' counting for one. ' ' To put the matter
in a less abstract an<i technical way, we shall aim at

185

GOD AND MAN

the most equal distribution of good that is consistent
with there being as much good as possible to dis-
tribute. Even so, the principle of equality must, if
necessary, be qualified by the principle of the
superior importance of the higher sorts of well-being
which are only possible for the few.

To apply these abstract considerations to practice
to ask to what practical conclusions they point in
the region of individual conduct, or of social effort,
or of political action forms no part of my present
undertaking. From the impossibility of actually
realising ideal justice I have endeavoured to suggest
the conclusion that social justice must be always,
looked upon as an ideal a far-off ideal, to which
only more or less distant approaches are possible
even in the region of self-consistent Utopias. This,
would, perhaps, be admitted by many zealous
advocates of equality. But I hope I have further
indicated the necessity of not making justice, even
as an ideal, our primary object, but rather general
well-being ; and I trust I have shown that such a
course is imperatively required by ideal justice
itself, since the only equality that is capable of
immediate realisation is equality of consideration,,
and to produce equality of distribution at the cost
of there being very little good to distribute would,
be a violation of that one essential equality. If in
the course of my argument I have incidentally
suggested that some of the arguments by which
Socialism is sometimes advocated will not stand
examination, I trust it has become no less evident
that any attempt to justify the status quo as an even
approximate realisation of justice is a still more
desperate undertaking. This may be for the mo-
ment with the exception of this or that immediately
possible reform a less violation of justice than any
other possible system, and so long the maintenance
of the existing order of society minus the possible
reforms will be demanded by justice itself ; justice

186

JUSTICE THE THEORY OF REWARD

can never require us to make matters worse. But
none the less, the discrepancy between the present
distribution of wealth and any that could a priori
be justified in the interests of general well-being,
calls upon us to begin in earnest the struggle for a
more socially beneficial system, though we shall be
prepared to find that even in the remote future no
system of distribution that is at once possible and
socially expedient, will realise the dream of any other
equality than equality of consideration.

The ideal justice which I have attempted to adum-
brate is not capable of immediate political realisa-
tion. It would open up a large question were I to
ask how far it is capable of immediate application
in the domain of private ethics I mean, how far it
is possible for each individual to act upon principles
of ideal justice, in so far as it rests with himself to
determine how much of that portion of the world's
wealth over which he has legal control he shall
allocate to himself, and how much to the service of
other individuals or of the community. I cannot
attempt now to discuss that question adequately ;
but I believe that the principal use of raising such
speculative questions as to the nature of ideal justice
is to suggest the necessity for bringing principle to
bear upon the question of personal expenditure. It
is obvious that it is not possible for most people in
an un-ideal state to act in accordance with what
would be the ideal in an ideal state of things. For
each man to allot to himself no more of the good
things of this life than would be his under a regime of
ideal justice, would demand a heroism which it
would not demand under such a regime, and at times
would be injurious to others, and even to society at
large. In some directions it would be inexpedient
for any one ; in many directions it would be in-
expedient for every one. Some measure of con-
formity to the customs of one's class or position,
in such matters as eating and drinking, dress,

187

GOD AND MAN

entertainment, amusement, and the like, is demanded
under penalty of hardship and isolation such as
would not be endured by any one, were such matters
arranged for us on principles of ideal justice in a
socialistic State. Still, it is a clear duty on- the part
of every one who is convinced that the share of good
things enjoyed by the few is disproportionate and
intrinsically unjust, to seek to limit his own personal
expenditure in such matters wherever he can do so
without a less efficient discharge of his own social
function. It would be a step to the creation of a
new morality upon such subjects, if we were to
cultivate the habit of compelling ourselves to give
some kind of reason for our indulgence in any find
of expenditure over and above what would be
allotted to us upon the principle " Every one to
count for one, nobody for more than one," whether
the justification be found in our particular social
function, in the conditions necessary for the exercise
of our own particular capacities, natural or acquired,
or only in the necessities and conventionalities of the
existing social code, which sometimes render unequal
private appropriation the smaller of two evils.

188

VIII
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 1

POPULAR impressions of the Middle Ages generally
fail to distinguish between two very dissimilar
periods. Sometimes, indeed, the term Dark Ages is
^discriminatingly applied to the whole period from
the fall of the Western Empire to the Renaissance or
the Reformation. As a matter of fact the Dark
Ages that is to say the period of gross ignorance
and uncivilisation passed away at about the end
of the Tenth Century. The Eleventh Century was
a period of progress, while the Twelfth witnessed
one of the most brilliant and extraordinary outbursts
of intellectual vitality which history records. Art,
Religion, Education, Literature, Philosophy renewed
tneir life. We are concerned to-day only with one
side of this great revival the growth of what is
commonly called the Scholastic Philosophy and the
Scholastic Theology. The chief intellectual nourish-
ment of the Dark Ages had consisted (so far as
secular knowledge was concerned) in the remains,
the scattered debris, of old-world Philosophy one or
two writings of Plato, and second-hand accounts of
his opinions embedded in later writers, one or two
fragments, chiefly the Logic of Aristotle, and later
commentators or compilers like Boethius. These
works had suggested the problems on which the
scholars of the Dark Ages had spent their strength
especially the great medieval problem as to the
reality of Universals the question as to what it is
that we mean when we talk about some universal
class, the class of horses or the class of men. Is the
universal man a real thing (as the Realists held) or
are we to say (with the Nominalists) that it is a mere
name which we apply to many individual things a
name and nothing but a name, or at most a name
for an idea in our minds while in nature nothing is

1 An Address given at Holy Trinity Church, Sloane Street, March 12,.
1899.

189

GOD AND MAN

real but the particular ? All through the Dark Ages
this controversy which under altered names and
forms is still the great problem of modern Philosophy
had smouldered : and with the advent of the
Twelfth Century Renaissance it burst into flame in
the great controversies which centre round the name
of Abelard. Upon the purely philosophical aspect
of these problems I must not linger, but I must say
one word about the way in which they affected
Religion. During the Dark Ages, i.e. up to the
Twelfth Century, men had tended on the whole to
keep Religion and Philosophy apart. There had
been a Scholastic Philosophy but hardly a Scholastic
Theology. Their Philosophy was based upon the
old pre-Christian thinkers, Plato and Aristotle. And
if they ever thought for themselves, their speculations
stopped at the threshold of what is commonly called
Revealed Religion. Theological study meant chiefly
putting together what had been said by various
Fathers. Controversy had taken the shape of
merely disputing what the Fathers meant. But
when in the Twelfth Century men began to think in
earnest, this state of things could not last, they could
not help seeing that the Fathers were not always
consistent, either with themselves or with one
.another ; they could not help at least disputing
over the things which the Fathers had left open,
and pitting one authority against another, and
thinking on such questions that the Fathers had left
open. The great thinker Abelard whose teaching
drew thousands of eager students to Paris, and made
it for the first time the centre of European education,
published a book with the audacious title Sic et
Non, " Yes and No," in which he arrayed all the
authorities on both sides of every disputable theo-
logical question. That book was the beginning of
the Scholastic Theology. And this new Theology
did not stop at merely filling in the gaps and removing
the discrepancies of the traditional teaching of the

190

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

Church. It went on to ask what was the ultimate
foundation of all Religion, Natural or Revealed.
And, adopting the new Scholastic methods, it was
not content to give the arguments on one side, but
it gave the argument on both sides. To the horror
and amazement of old-fashioned Churchmen, the
spectacle was now seen in the very schools of the
Church (for all schools at this time in Northern
Europe were Church Schools) of Christian teachers
and Christian scholars exerting their utmost intel-
lectual ingenuity in discovering and making the
most of all the arguments that could be urged
against the belief which all Christians held most
dear. To the question " Does God exist ? " they
would gay : 'It appears not " and then follow all
the arguments that can be urged against the existence
of God, followed by all the arguments that can be
urged in its favour. The intention in most cases
was to establish, rather than to destroy : the con-
clusions were in the main those of the received
Theology. But not always. When people once
begin to think, they cannot always stop just where
they themselves would like to stop. Though they
might be sincerely attached to the Christian tradi-
tions, they could not always succeed in arriving at
the same conclusions as the Fathers or in replying
to the objector without admitting some part of his
case. Even in the attempt to reconcile the very
conflicting utterances of different Fathers, many
thinkers were naturally landed in what the Church
called heresy. Abelard for instance, was twice
condemned by*councils ; and among the doctrines
which awakened the fiercest resentment against him
on the part of conservative Theologians like St.
Bernard was a view of the Atonement which he
shared with no less a man than St. Anselm, the
saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, a profounder if a
less bold thinker than Abelard himself. They were
the first thinkers for some hundreds of years who

191

GOD AND MAN

ventured to deny that the death of Christ was a
ransom paid to the Devil ; while Abelard was the
first to assert that the Atonement was not an expia-
tion which altered the attitude of God to man, but
a revelation of the changeless love of God which
altered the attitude of man to God.

And sometimes this dissolving process did not stop
at heresy. Towards the end of the Twelfth or the
beginning of the Thirteenth Century a great revolu-
tion came upon the world of medieval thought
through the recovery of the long buried writings of
Aristotle. Hitherto the medieval world had known
only the Logic of Aristotle : but now the whole of
Aristotle's writings on Natural Science, and the
whole of his speculations about the Universe, and its
relations to God, were thrown open in Latin trans-
lations to the Western scholar. And Aristotle did
not come alone. He came with the comments of
Arab philosophers and independent works of Arab
thinkers, which laid stress upon just the most un-
orthodox elements in the teaching of their Master,
his assertion to the eternity of the world, his denial
of immortality to individual souls, his tendency to
reduce God from the righteous and personal will
which Christianity holds Him to be, to a merely
thinking intelligence or even to a thought which can
hardly be called a thinker. All these speculations
centred round the mighty name of Averroes, to
medieval minds henceforth the dreaded incarnation
of all heresy or infidelity, in which capacity you will
often see him represented in the pictures of the great
Italian Masters.

For a time the Church attempted to deal with the
heresy by fire and sword. Many representatives of
the new speculations were burned, and the reading
of Aristotle was wholly forbidden. But just at this
crisis the second decade of the Thirteenth Century
the whole history of the Western Church was
altered by the appearance upon the stage of history

192

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

of two great orders the Order of St. Dominic and
the Order of St. Francis, the Friars Preachers and
the Friars Minors, who set before themselves a wholly
new ideal of monastic perfection. The old monastic
orders had degenerated into wealthy corporations of
celibate country gentlemen, living comfortable, lux-
urious and idle lives under Abbots who spent most
of their time in hunting and dining with the neigh-
bouring squires. The Franciscans and Dominicans
begged their bread from door to door. The ideal of
the old Monastic founders had been to retire from a
godless world and to save their own souls. The
Franciscans and the Dominicans aimed at converting
the world instead of forsaking it. The Franciscan
Order was originally founded especially for work
among the poor. The Dominican Order had for its
especial task the suppression of heresy, and the
conversion of the intellectual classes. In part no
doubt the Dominicans shared the ideas of the age as
to the proper way to deal with intellectual doubt.
It was part of their function to work that awful
engine of cruelty and greed, the Holy Inquisition.
And it is impossible to deny that their success in
re-establishing the shaken faith of the Middle Ages
was largely due to wholesale burnings and imprison-
ments. But the Dominicans were not wholly
obscurantists. They aimed at satisfying the new-
born zeal for knowledge, while they gave it an
innocent and orthodox direction. They set them-
selves to study, to comment on, to teach and to
explain the great Library of Aristotelian Literature,
which had at first been looked upon with so much
suspicion. They found that there was much in
Aristotle that was quite innocent, and had no
tendency to undermine the Christian faith. Much
in him they found that was not only innocent and
intellectually enlightening, but positively edifying
and of the highest moral value much that was quite
in harmony with the teaching of the New Testament,
N 193

GOD AND MAN

much that would serve as an excellent basis and
preparation for the higher and more spiritual teaching
of the Church, much that could well be combined
with and absorbed into the hitherto rather incoherent
mass of Christian thought which was now gradually
under the great Scholastic theologians being codified
and solidified into a compact and elaborate body of
Christian dogma. Where the new teaching was
definitely and obstinately un-Christian, they aimed
.at refuting, correcting, or supplementing it. It was
mainly through the work of the great Dominican
Theologians that Theology attained the form of an
elaborate and coherent body of doctrine the system
that is still taught in the Seminaries of the Roman
Catholic Church, and which has exercised far more
influence than most of us suspect upon the traditional
Theology in which we ourselves have been brought
up, which has a good deal to say to the Theology
which is being taught every Sunday by men who
would be shocked to hear that they owe anything to
the Popish Theology of the Middle Ages. In the
building up of this great system the first stones were
laid by Albert the Great, and the edifice was com-
pleted by his still more famous pupil, St. Thomas
Aquinas.

St. Thomas was born in 1227 at Aquino in Calabria,
or at least at one of the princely castles of his family
in that region of Southern Italy. He came of a most
illustrious family of Counts who took their title from
that place. His mother was the sister of the Roman
Emperor. Thomas was thus nephew of the Em-
perors Frederick I and Henry VI and cousin of
Frederick II. I will pass over the vision of angels,
or as the more rationalistic version says the visit of
a hermit to his mother, the predictions of his future
career, the crown of glory that hovered over his
head, and the other signs which to the medieval
biographer appeared the necessary preliminary to
the birth of a Saint, the miracles by which his

194

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

cradle was surrounded, the mythical stories of his
childish tricks, and come straight to historical facts.
At the tender age of five he was sent to be educated
to the great and wealthy Monastery of Monte
Cassino, the head-quarters of the Benedictine Order,
and the monastery of which the founder himself had
been Abbot. It was intended that he should be a
monk : to be a monk at Monte Cassino was a very
respectable position for a young Count with a taste
for the religious life ; his uncle was Abbot of the
Monastery, and the young Thomas would doubtless
liave succeeded to his position as he grew older.
The monks, however, sent him to the University of
^Naples to prosecute his studies. At Naples he came
under the influence of the new Order who were
everywhere trying to get into their ranks young men
of promise to aid them in the conversion of the world.
Under their guidance he soon revolted against the
life of useless and indolent routine which would have
.awaited him in the fashionable monastery, and he
joined the new democratic Order in which the young
Count would have to beg his bread from door to
door, to eat broken meats and wear coarse clothes
just like the ploughman's son beside him. The
alarming news reached his aristocratic mother. She
hastened to Naples to see her son not to deter him
.from entering the order, according to the highly
improbable account of his biographer, but to encour-
.age his pious purpose. However, knowing the
^weakness of mothers, the friars dodged her : respect
for parents has never been a monastic virtue. The
youth was passed about from place to place. His
.military brothers were sent to pursue him, getting
leave of absence for the purpose from the Emperor
Frederick with whose army they were serving in
Tuscany. At last they caught him reposing beside
.a fountain with the friars in charge of him. They
tried to tear the black and white robes of the then
detested Order off his back. He resisted vigorously,

195

GODAND MAN

but was captured and sent back to his mother. The
family tried to persuade him to leave the Order, but
in vain ; whereupon they imprisoned him in one of
their castles. The friars, robbed of their prey, com-
plained to their great protector, the Pope. On the
Pope's remonstrances, the Emperor had the brothers
arrested, but the friars were apparently afraid to
provoke the hostility of this powerful family. The
brothers were set at liberty and Thomas was kept in
prison. For two years the mother attempted to>
shake his resolution by force and fraud, by hardship
and insidious temptation. They tore his coarse
friar's robe, but he persisted in wearing the rags.
At last his mother gave up the attempt and helped
him to escape by the window. The Order sent him
to study at Cologne and he afterwards became
Doctor of Theology at Paris. At this time there was-
a great feud going on between the secular teachers
of Paris and the friars who were trying to capture
the education of the University while they refused
to submit to its control. The friars, though sup-
ported by king and Pope alike, were fiercely hooted
and pelted whenever they appeared in the streets.
The feud was so bitter that the troops of St. Louis
had to mount guard while St. Thomas took his
degree. For many years the energies of the Uni-
versity were chiefly devoted to the attempt to
exclude from its ranks the teacher who came to be
regarded as its most brilliant ornament, and its most
famous Saint. The protection of the Pope enabled
the friars to conquer : and the theology of St.
Thomas became the dominant theology of the most
famous of Medieval Universities. Oxford to some:
extent held aloof and built up a theology of its own,
more original and in some ways more interesting
than the cut and dried theology of St. Thomas. But
it is the Philosophy of St. Thomas that is to-day the
official Philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church,
and, though the Roman Church boasts a few dogmas.

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of which St. Thomas had never dreamed, the bulk of
Roman Theology is still the theology of St. Thomas
more than ever (I may add) since the impetus
given to the study of him by the present cultivated
Thomist Pope. 1

There is little more to be said of the life of our
liero. It was passed chiefly at Paris and at Cologne ;
it was one continuous round of devotion, study,
teaching, preaching, and writing. His Biographer
in the Acta Sanctorum is of course full of visions,
miraculous cures, miraculous elevations during
prayers, and stories of his absence of mind, his
absorption in speculations (even while dining with
the King) and his incredible humility. On this last
matter the critical reader may perhaps be allowed
to doubt whether the very finest kind of humility
really was possessed by the man who boasted that
he had never once felt a single emotion of vain-glory
while lecturing to the adoring crowds of students
who flocked to his chair. But perhaps we ought not
attach too much importance to these stories of his
biographer ten generations after the event. The
most trustworthy record of his life lies in the immense
array of his works. They occupy in different
editions seventeen, eighteen or twenty-eight folio
volumes. The best known of these works, the
Summa Theologiae, by itself fills eight fat octavo
volumes of the closest print, though no doubt this
was finished by a disciple. These reveal a mind
stored with all the knowledge of his age an age (be
it remembered) in which knowledge had to be
gathered from badly written MSS. full of contractions
and condensations which the modern expert reads
slowly and with difficulty. When one gazes at the
monuments of such incredible industry, one can
almost believe the story that he was in the habit of
dictating to three or even four amanuenses at once.

1 [Leo. XIII (1878-1903). The reference is particularly to the Encyclical
Aeterni Patris issued in 1879.] EDD.

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GOD AND MAN

On one occasion it is said he even went on dictating
while asleep. He died in the Abbey of Fossa Nuova
near Faienza as he was on his way to the Council of
Lyons in 1274, and was canonised in 1323. After
several transportations and many disputes his body
eventually found a resting place hi the house of his
Order at Toulouse, except his right arm which was-
transferred to Paris.

Thomas Aquinas did a great work for his time by
putting Christianity into a shape in which it satisfied,
on the whole, the intellect of his day by combining
the truth about God which the world had learned
from Christ with all the truth about man and the
Universe which it had learned from other sources
and chiefly from ancient Greece. But knowledge
and thought go on growing, and the work which St.
Thomas did for his age wants doing again for ours ;
for knowledge increases and thought advances, and
Theology, if it is to be a living science, must advance
too. The greatest idea that we owe to St. Thomas
is his magnificent conception of Theology as a science
in which the results of all other sciences, the highest
generalisations in all departments of thought, are
summed up and harmoniously combined in a great
theory about the ultimate meaning of the world
about the relations between God, the World, and
man. That ideal is one which we want to keep-
steadily before our eyes, for it is an ideal still more
valuable than any positive doctrine which is to be
found in his writings. There are elements in his-
writings which are of real value even now. You
will find very often the traditional doctrines of
Christianity presented in a far more intelligent and
intelligible form in the writings of St. Thomas than
they are in the popular theology of modern times
the doctrine of the Holy Trinity for instance. You
will not find in St. Thomas any support for that
popular conception of the Trinity which is too often
produced in the theological text-books of to-day

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ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

as practically three separate minds, intelligences,
wills, i.e. practically three Gods very like one another
and in the habit of close co-operation with one an-
other. In the writings of St. Thomas you will find
the three persons explained as three " proprieties "
or as we might modernise the phrase, three dis-
tinguishable and essential attributes : God is Power,
and God is Wisdom, and God is Love Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost. That is the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity as you will find it expounded in St. Thomas
and you cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas :
for on all those matters in which the Reformers did
not diverge from the teaching of the medieval
Church, it was St. Thomas more than any one else who
determined what Orthodoxy was to be.

But for the most part it is not by borrowing from
St. Thomas that we shall best follow his example
certainly not by collecting from his writings baseless
and phantastic speculations about Angels, discussions
as to whether two Angels (being without bodies) can
occupy the same space and the like as one some-
times sees done in silly little manuals of religious
teaching. Rather let us try boldly and courageously
to grapple with the intellectual difficulties of our age
as he did with the intellectual difficulties of his.
Nay, we must grapple with them more boldly than
he did : for though his thinking is vigorous, his con-
clusions are in great part predetermined. St.
Thomas is reactionary even for his own day ; he
reimposed upon the thought of his age many of the
fetters which the bolder thinkers of his time were on
the point of breaking through. He secured to his
age and incorporated into the very substance of the
Church's teaching one-half of the new truths of his
age at the cost of stereotyping a great deal that was
really out-worn. But still the theologians of our
age have much to learn from St. Thomas. Evolution
and Darwinism, the results of Old Testament Criti-
cism, and New Testament Criticism, the results of

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GOD AND MAN

modern Science and the speculations of modern
Philosophy these things are the new truths of our
age, these things are to us what the re-discovery of
Aristotle and Averroes was to the Thirteenth
Century. We must face them as St. Thomas faced
them. All in the new ideas that is true will have to
"be embodied in the theology of the future : and
whatever in the theology of the past is not true will
have to disappear. Those who believe most firmly
in the imperishable value of Christ's teaching to the
world ought to believe most confidently that that
deposit of truth will shine forth all the more brightly
when the foreign accretions have been removed, and
the revelation of God in it is set in its due relation
to .the revelation of God in the Universe as it is
understood by the light of reason.

In some ways the task before us is very like that
which St. Thomas accomplished for his age. And
in some ways our mode of attacking it must be
something like this. We must approach it with his
lively faith that all true religion must commend itself
to Reason. But in other respects our own method of
reconstructing theology must be different from his.
I will only mention one of them. He lived hi an
unhistorical age, whereas the spirit of our age is
essentially historical. To the age of St. Thomas
Christ had become almost purely a metaphysical
being. Men speculated about His nature, about the
mode of the Incarnation, about the process of
Redemption, and they did so almost without refer-
ence to the historical facts of Christ's life and the
historical records of his teaching records which they
had not the knowledge to understand aright. That
cannot be so with us. The very beginning of the
reconstruction which our theology needs must be to
paint for ourselves a true and historical picture of
what Christ actually was, and what He taught, and
what He meant by that teaching. It must not,
indeed, be assumed that all Christian thought that

200

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

is of later origin all speculation about God's nature,
all ways of describing the nature of the work of
Christ, all theories about the work of grace in the
soul which cannot be found in the actual teaching of
Christ are of no value. Doctrines which are of
later growth may be legitimate deductions from
what Christ taught ; they may help us to understand
it better : or, when they cannot be directly based
upon Christ's teaching, they may represent the
independent results of Christian, thinkers trained in
the philosophical schools of Greece. Christ always
taught that the work which He had begun was to
be carried on by the working of the Holy Spirit in
the minds of His disciples, and we must look for the
effects of that perpetual inspiration not only in the
practical religious life but also in the thought and the
reflection of the Christian Church. Only, if we
Relieve in the inspiration of Christ's Church, we
must believe in it thoroughly. We must believe
that that inspiration has not ceased, that the Holy
Spirit is working in the religious thought of our own
day as much as in the religious thought of the past.
And we must not look for the results only in the
deliberations of ecclesiastical assemblies or in the
writings of formal Theologians. The work of re-
construction, or restatement, of theological progress
is visibly going on among us. It can be traced in
the writings of professional Theologians alike
among those who are reputed orthodox and con-
servative and among those who are called advanced
or even dangerous. And yet it is not always through
the work of professional theologians that the new
Christian thought of our age the Christianisation of
the new knowledge and the intellectual reconstruc-
tion of the old faith reaches the majority of
educated men. Much of the best theology of our
age, forinstance, is to be found in Poetry. Butitwould
be absurd to say that Tennyson and Browning have
done for their age exactly the work which St. Thomas

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GOD AND MAN

did for his. We do still want a systematic Theology
or Christian philosophy like that of St. Thomas,
though it must be a theology or a philosophy of a
more modest type, a theology that is content to-
leave unsolved many of the problems which St.
Thomas is prepared to answer with such lawyer-like
precision.

And yet it is probable that many will find and
have found in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning
what they have been unable to find in the writings
of the Theologian and the sermons of the Preacher.
The study of St. Thomas is now confined almost
entirely to the priest and the professional student,
but the ideas of St. Thomas still live for the un-
theological world of culture in the poetry of Dante.

Even so it is perhaps through the expression it has
found in the poetry of Tennyson and Browning that
the professed theological teaching of the age that is
just passing away will contribute most to that fuller,
richer, completer understanding of the Christian
faith which is the heritage let us not doubt it of
ourselves and for our children.

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IX

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA, A MEDIEVAL.

HUME

Two causes have prevented full justice being done
to the philosophical penetration and originality of
the Schoolmen. Their acuteness, their subtlety, and
their industry have been sufficiently praised. It has-
even been recognised that beneath a thin veil of
orthodoxy the thinness of which was sometimes
appreciated, sometimes not even suspected, by the
thinker himself much bold speculation really went
on in the medieval Schools. But it is sometimes,
forgotten that the acknowledged Doctors of the
Church were not the only thinkers who once taught
and lectured and disputed in the Rue du Fouarre at
Paris or our Oxford School > Street : perhaps these-
were not always the most brilhant or the most
original. One cause which has tended to give an
exaggerated impression of the orthodoxy and defer-
ence to authority prevalent in the medieval Schools,
is the fact that the heretics, though at one time they
often enjoyed considerable vogue, were at length as
a rule more or less suppressed, so completely some-
times that nothing remains of their writings but the-
propositions for which they were condemned and
which hi most cases, but not always, they eventually
retracted. The other is the great advantage which
the regular clergy possessed over the seculars in
diffusing their teaching throughout Europe and
getting them copied, circulated, preserved, and
handed on after their deaths eventually, after the-
invention of printing, printed and brought within
easy reach of the modern scholar. The secular
Master of Arts or Doctor of Theology could not so
easily transfer himself and his lectures from Oxford
to Paris, and from Paris to Prague or Vienna, while-
it was a regular part of the Mendicant system to
transfer their Lecturers from one convent to another.

203;

GOD AND MAN

Every famous Oxford Friar, sooner or later, taught
at Paris, and what was known in Paris was soon
known to the world. Once accepted and approved
TDV his Order, the Mendicant Doctor was provided
with an organised army of disciples, pledged by the
spirit of monastic loyalty to diffuse his teaching
during his lifetime, and to hand it down to posterity
after his death. The great rows of costly folios
which represent the Schoolman to the modern
historian of Philosophy are for the most part the
works of Mendicant Doctors : the works of the
secular thinkers, from whom in many cases it is
known that these Doctors received their first inspira-
tion, remain unprinted and unexplored in the MS.
presses of our University and College Libraries,
"when their heresies were not conspicuous enough to
procure for them the greater distinction of the
tjonfire.

A most conspicuous instance of the success of
"well-regulated persecution in condemning thought to
oblivion is supplied by the fate of Wycliffe's writings.
Wycliffe was, even before the date of his open
-quarrel with the Church, about the most famous
Schoolman of his day : he was famous as a pure
Philosopher, a Logician, and a Metaphysician, before
he wrote Theology at all ; and he was famous as a
Theologian before he was famous as a heretic. Yet,
in spite of all his fame, his works, with the exception
of a few of the most popular, have remained in MS.
till the Wycliffe Society began its valuable labours in
connexion with the quinquacentenary of his death.
Even now that his works occupy a whole shelf in our
Libraries, no historian of Philosophy has discovered
the existence of such a thinker : even his name does
not appear in Prantl or Erdmann or Ueberweg 1 or
Haureau's History of the Scholastic Philosophy.

1 [This is no longer true of the present edition of "Ueberweg. Here
Wycliffe is coupled with Thomas Bradwardine as a Scotist Formalist.
Cf. Ueberweg, Die Patristische und Scholastische Philosophie, nth edition,
Berlin, 1928.] EDD.

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NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

But the most curious instance of this process of
inverted natural selection which has come under my
notice is the fate of the writer whom I wish to take
this opportunity of introducing perhaps I may
venture to say for the first time to the notice of
modern Philosophers. It might seem hardly credible
that a writer of the Fourteenth Century should have
anticipated the main theses of Berkeley and of
Hume, and yet occupy but a line or two in the
recognised histories of Philosophy. But such is the
fact. The Aristotelian Society exists primarily to
promote the study of Philosophy, not of the history
of Philosophy ; to say nothing of so antiquarian a
department of that history as the Philosophy of the
Fourteenth Century. Still, the ideas of this neglected
Schoolman are so curious and interesting that I hope-
I am not mistaken in supposing that the members
of this Society might like, by way of diversion from,
the more actual and present-day controversies which
usually claim their attention, to hear a little about
a forgotten chapter in the history of thought.

In one of the great folios of du Boulay's history of
the University of Paris, there is printed a brief
document in which one Nicholas de Ultricuria (else-
where spelt Autricuria) retracts certain propositions,
which he had maintained in the Schools of Arts at
Paris, and for holding which he was deprived of his
Mastership of Arts and declared incapable of pro-
ceeding to the degree of Doctor of Theology. The
document as there printed is only a fragment : the
whole of it now appears in the second volume of the
magnificent Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis,
edited by the late Father Denifle and M. Chatelain.
The document even now occupies but ten quarto
pages. One letter of his to a philosophical opponent
has been printed in D'Argentre's Cottectio Judiciorum
de novis erroribus i 1 two remain in MS. at Paris. This-
is all that remains of the activity of one who appears

IT. i, p. 358-

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GOD AND MAN

to have felt all the philosophic doubts which, as
developed by Berkeley and Hume, all subsequent
Philosophy has been seeking either to confirm or to
remove. No doubt the ability of a thinker is to be
determined not by the theses which he propounds
but by the arguments which he uses in defence of
them : the arguments used by Nicholas are very
inadequately preserved. But what remains makes
it clear that if his penetration was not equal to that
of Berkeley and Hume, he had fairly entered upon
the line of thought which is now associated with
their names.

Of the man himself scarcely anything at all is
loiown. He came from Autricourt, in the diocese
of Verdun, and may therefore, I suppose, be set down
as a German. He performed a disputation for the
degree of Doctor of Theology some time before 1342. 1
In 1340, with five others, one of them being an
Englishman Henricus Anglicus, of the Cistercian
Order he was summoned to the Papal Court at
Avignon to answer certain charges of heresy ; he is
now described as a Licentiate of Theology, i.e., he
had all but completed the elaborate course which
then conducted to the degree of Doctor in that
Faculty. Eight years before, being then a Bachelor
of Theology, he was " provided " by the Pope to a
Canonry at Metz. This, it may be mentioned, was
.at the time the usual way of securing a maintenance
for University Teachers in the Northern Universities.
.No endowments expressly designed for University
Chairs at present existing, Prebends and College
Fellowships (which last at Paris ceased when the
D.D. degree was taken) were the only means of
.subsistence available for such Teachers. His case
was referred to a Cardinal, 2 and the affair apparently
lingered on, more Romano, for six years. It was not
till 1346 that judgment was given to the effect

^Charlularium Univcrsitatis Parisiensis, T. II, No. 912, note.
*Ibid., No. 1041 and notes ; cf. Auctarium, T. I, c. n.

206

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

already mentioned. Retractation in a beaten Con-
troversialist at that time involved no disgrace ; it
was looked upon very much in the same light as the
.act of a modern politician or newspaper editor who
retracts a libel which he has found himself unable to
justify to the satisfaction of a Judge or Jury, though
he may still retain his private opinion that it is true.
Nicholas retracted his errors at Avignon in 1346 ; on
St. Catherine's Day, November 25th, 1347, he pub-
licly recanted them in a sermon at the Dominican
Church in Paris, and with his own hand burned the
theses and the tractate in which they had been
defended. His moderation was not unrewarded.
In 1348 two years after his condemnation he is
Dean of Metz, and the friends who had shared his
errors seem for the most part to have likewise
achieved satisfactory ecclesiastical careers.

There is only one more point which has possibly
to be added to this jejune record. A certain MS.,
supposed to be a discourse of Pope Clement VI,
bearing the date 1343, declares that Nicholas had
fled to the Court of Louis of Bavaria, the anti-papal
claimant of the Imperial crown. 1 Father Denifle
.appears to doubt the story : yet, if true, it would
account for the long delay in pronouncing his con-
demnation. And the fact would fit in with all that
we know of the political and ecclesiastical events of
the time. Nicholas was certainly a disciple of
William of Occam, who likewise joined the party,
and lived at the Court of Louis of Bavaria, and died
unreconciled with the Holy See in 1347. The still
bolder anti-papalist thinkers Marsilius of Padua and
John of Jandun and many other more or less sus-
pected Theologians were members of the group
which rallied round the enlightened but unfortunate
Louis of Bavaria.

However, our interest lies not in the life of Nicholas
of Autricourt but in his theses. The first list of errors

1 See the Note in Chart. Univ. Paris., T. II, p. 720.

207

GOD AND MAN

charged against Nicholas of Autricourt are thirty-
two in number. To this is appended a further list
of admissions made by him in the presence of Pope
Clement VI himself or of the Cardinal to whom the
case was committed, together with another schedule
sent no doubt by his enemies from Paris. I will
read, with a few comments, the list of the thirty-
two propositions, and then add a few words as to
the fight that is thrown on them by the subsequent
lists and the one printed letter. I think it will
probably be best to translate them, adding the
words of the original Latin 1 :

(1) " The proposition ' Man is an animal ' is not
necessary according to the faith."

[" Dixi et scrip(si quod) hec propositio : homo est animal, non
est necessaria secundum fidem, non attendens pro tune con-
nexionem necessariam predictorum terminorum."]

This proposition Nicholas admits that he had laid
down " without attending for the moment to the
necessary connexion of the aforesaid terms." This
is clearly a piece of Occamistic Empiricism ; it
asserts that all our knowledge rests upon experience,,
and that it is not a priori unthinkable that there
should be men that are not animals.

(2) " From the fact that one thing exists, it cannot
by any evidence derived from a first principle be
deduced that another thing exists."

[" Ex eo, quod una res est, non potest evidenter evidentia
educta ex primo principle inferri, quod alia res sit."]

This amounts to Locke's denial of innate ideas, or,
in modern language, of any a priori or axiomatic
truth, and in particular of the axioms upon which
the validity of all reasoning depends. In the lan-
guage of certain modern friends of ours, axioms
even the principle of contradiction are only pos-
tulates. If this interpretation of him be true, I have

^Chart. Univ. Paris., T. II, No. 1124.
208

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

no doubt our friends the Pragmatists, each of whom
is always ready to admit that not he but somebody
else invented Pragmatism, will be ready enough to
claim Nicholas de Ultricuria as the founder of their
School.

(3) " From the fact that one thing is, it cannot
evidently, with an evidence deduced from a first
principle, be inferred that another thing is not."

[" Ex eo, quod una res est, non potest evidenter inferri quod
alia res non sit."]

(4) " From the fact that one thing is not, it cannot
be evidently inferred that another thing is not."

[" Ex eo, quod una res non est, non potest evidenter evidentia
deducta ex primo principle inferri, quod alia res non sit."]

(5) " From the fact that one thing is not, it cannot
be evidently inferred that another thing is."

[" Ex eo, quod una res non est, non potest evidenter inferri,
quod alia res sit."]

These three propositions of course imply the same
principle as the preceding ones.

(6) " Evident certainty has no degrees."
[" Certitude evidentie non habet gradus."]

This principle would seem to mean that one self-
evident proposition cannot be more or less self-
evident than another self-evident proposition. It
would be perhaps to attribute to Nicholas too much
anticipatory insight to suppose that he is denying
the doctrine of degrees of truth and reality in the
form given it by Mr. Bradley or Mr. Joachim. It is
probable that he was thinking of Aristotle's law that
some truths were yveaptpuTepa aei than others,

(7) " Except the certainty of faith there is no
other certainty but the certainty of a first principle

o 209

GOD AND MAN

or of a proposition which can be resolved into a first
principle."

[" Excepta certitudine fidei non erat alia certitude nisi certi-
tude primi principii vel que in primumprincipiumpotestresolvi."]

The exact polemical point of this is obscure ; per-
haps it means that propositions which rest for their
truth upon induction from experience cannot be
certain ; and since Nicholas has already asserted
that no proposition about existence is really self-
evident or a first principle, it will follow that no
proposition whatever is intellectually certain, though
Faith may supply the deficiencies of Reason.

(8) " Of the existence of material substance
distinct from our own soul we have no evident
certainty."

[" De substantia material! alia ab anima nostra non habemus
<:ertitudinem evidentie."]

Putting aside the Sceptics who doubted every-
thing, this is, so far as I know, the earliest piece of
really thorough-going Idealism before the Idealism of
Berkeley and Hume that is to say, if Idealism
means or includes a doubt as to the existence of a
material world except hi and for mind or some kind
of spiritual experience. It might no doubt be said
that we have here merely the problematical Idealism
of Descartes ; but it does not appear that Nicholas,
like Descartes, discovered any indirect way of prov-
ing the independent existence of an external world
which, as he contended, was not immediately certain.

(9) " The inference from the proposition 'A is and
formerly was not ' to the proposition ' something
different from A is,' is not evident with an evidence
deduced from a first principle."

[" Hec consequenti(a : a est et prius n)on fuit, igitur alia res
ab a est, non est evidens eviden(tia deducta ex primo) principio."]

The point of this thesis is much the same as that
210

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

of the first five propositions ; the only new feature
is that the assertion is now apparently limited to
things which have a beginning, to events.

(10) " This consequence is not admitted with any
evidence deduced from a first principle ; ' Fire is
brought near to tow and no counteracting cause is
present, therefore the tow will be burned/ "

[" Hec con(sequentia non est evidens evi)dentia deducta ex
primo principle : Ignis est approx(imatus stupe et nullum e)st
impedirhentum : ergo stupa comburetur."]

Nicholas here proceeds from the denial of necessary
connexion in general to an explicit denial of the law
of Causality, or rather to what (as I for one should
contend) is quite a different thing, a denial of the
necessary or self-evident character of the Uniformity
of Nature ; and consequently of the self-evident
certainty of the inductive inferences based upon that
assumption. We shall see from the next proposition
that he does not here deny the law of Causality
itself ; what he denies is that a phenomenon must
necessarily be followed by another phenomenon
which has been observed usually to follow it, or, in
Berkeleyan language, that an idea cannot be the
cause of another idea.

(n) " We have no evident knowledge that there
can be any cause of any event other than God."

["Nescimus evidenter, quod ali(a a Deo possint)esse causa
alicujus effectus."]

(12) " We do not know evidently that any cause
which is not God exercises efficient causality."

[" Nescimus evidenter, quod aliqua causa causet efficienter que
non sit Deus."]

Here, no doubt, he goes beyond Berkeley in
denying the causality of the human will. From this
and other evidence it would appear that Nicholas

211

GOD AND MAN

was influenced by the strongly predestinarian ideas-
of Thomas Bradwardine ; what he meant was " God
must be the sole and ultimate cause even of our
voluntary acts."

(13) " We have no evident knowledge that there
can be or is any efficient natural cause."

[" Nescimus evidenter, quod aliqua causa efficiens naturalis sit
vel esse possit."]

This is another assertion of the same principle :.
" We know nothing of real efficient causes in the-
material world ; God is the sole cause of every
event."

(14) " We have no necessary knowledge whether
any effect is or can be naturally produced."

[" Nescimus evidenter, utrum aliquis effectus sit vel esse possit
naturaliter productus."]

(15) " Whatever conditions we take to be the-
cause of any effect, we do not evidently know that,
those conditions being posited, it follows that the
effect must be posited also."

[" Quibuscunque acceptis, que possunt esse causa alicujus
effectus, nescimus evidenter quod ad positionem eorum sequatur
effectus positio."]

A logical deduction from the preceding ; there is-
no absolute certainty in scientific prediction.

(16) " We do not evidently know that the subject
concurs in the production of any effect."

[" Nescimus evidenter, quod in aliqua productione concurrat
subjectum."]

The human will is (so far as we know) not only
not the cause, but not even a concurrent, or, as we
might say in modern language, a derived cause of
any effect.

(17) " There cannot be any demonstration simply
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NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

"by which through the mere existence of anything the
existence of an effect is demonstrated."

[" Quod nulla potest esse simpliciter demonstratio, qua
existentia tantum demonstretur existentia effectus."]

(18) "It is not evidently known to us that there
can be any demonstration from any prior position
which is really different from itself."

[" Non est nobis evidenter notum, quod possit esse aliqua
demonstratio a priori differenti realiter."]

In the last two propositions the denial of the
validity of inference seems to be extended not merely
to demonstrations which postulate the uniformity of
nature, but to all inference whatever. Here Nicholas
seems to go beyond Hume, though not perhaps
beyond the logical requirements of Hume's position.

(19) " The nobility of one thing above another
cannot be evidently shown."

[" Non potest evidenter ostendi nobilitas unius rei super
aliam."]

Here the scepticism is pushed into the moral
region. The way for this development had been
prepared by Duns Scotus, who denied the intrinsic
truth or obligation of the second table in the Deca-
logue but not of the first. God might have com-
manded man to lie and steal, and that would have
made lying and stealing moral ; but He could not
have commanded them to hate Himself or to take
His name in vain. Occam and his followers were
more logical, and denied the " perseitas boni "
altogether.

(20) " Whatever thing is proved to exist, no one
knows evidently that it does not exceed in nobility
all other things."

[" Quacunque re demonstrata nullus scit evidenter, qui(n
xcedat no)bilitate omnes alias."]

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GOD AND MAN

(21) " Whatever thing is known to exist, no one
knows evidently that it is not God, if by God we
understand the most noble being."

[" (Quacun)que re demonstrata nullus scit evidenter, quin ipsa
sit D(eus, si per Deum int)elligamtis ens nobilissimum."]

Nicholas is logical enough to recognise, as others
who have made Morality depend upon the arbitrary
will of God have not always done, that on his
premises he had no right, as far as Reason is
concerned, to attribute moral qualities to God. This
is one part of his meaning, but the proposition further
seems to imply " the existence of God, if by God is
meant anything more than the unknowable cause of
all phenomena, cannot be demonstrated." Since we
cannot assert that one thing is intrinsically nobler
than another, for all we know any existing thing may
be the noblest being in the world, and so, in the
sense defined, God.

(22) " No one evidently knows that one thing is
the end (or final cause) of another."

[" Aliquis nescit evidenter, quod una res sit finis a(lterius)."J

Here even modern Philosophers of great distinction
have shown less penetration than Nicholas. They
have not always seen that, if the authority and
objectivity of the moral consciousness be denied and
God be declared to be super-moral we have no
ground for any Teleology whatever. The idea of
value is derived from the moral consciousness, and
the distinction between means and end is a distinc-
tion of values. The end for which an event happens
is not distinguished from the means merely by being
posterior to it, but by being good, while the means
is not in itself good or is less good. This idea of good
is derived from our moral judgments, and from no
other source : deny the validity of those judgments,
and we can attach no meaning to the distinction
between means and ends.

214 .

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

(23) " No one knows evidently that, anything
being proved to exist, it may not be right to bestow
upon it the highest honour."

[" (Nul)lus scit evidenter qualibet re ostensa, quin sibi debea(t
impendere maximum ho)norem."j

In other words, it is impossible to construct an
a 'priori rational argument against any form of
idolatry. Any form of idolatry might be plausibly
defended on Pantheistic grounds. Here, once more,
our Schoolman perhaps compares favourably with
some of our modern thinkers, who assert that God is
everything, and yet would agree with the official
scribe who has appended to this proposition the
words " false, heretical, and blasphemous." And
yet, if anything that exists is perfectly good, why not
worship one thing as well or as much as anything
else ? Mr. Bradley has ridiculed Herbert Spencer in
a famous note : " [Mr. Spencer proposes] to take
something for God simply and solely because we do
not know what the devil it can be " ; J but he might,
perhaps, find it difficult to give any better reason for
the religious reverence with which he himself regards
his own Absolute, if once it is admitted that (in his
words) "the Reality is our criterion of worse and
better, of ugliness and beauty, of true and false, and
of real and unreal." 2 It is true that the Reality is
not its appearances, and that in the appearances there
are " degrees of Reality," but philosophic Brahmin-
ism and some other creeds will be prepared to
supply a corresponding number of degrees of worship.
I may be pardoned this little digression, because I
think it really brings out the drift of Nicholas'
thought.

(24) " No one knows evidently, but that this
proposition can reasonably be conceded : if anything
whatever is produced, God is produced."

["Aliquis nescit evidenter, quin ista possit rationabiliter
^Appearance and Reality, p. 128. 2 Ibid., p. 552.

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GOD AND MAN

cpnce(di : si aliq)ua res est producta, Deus est productus." Cf.
a. later thesis : " Corruptibile includit repugnantiam et con-
tradictionem."]

It is difficult to give a meaning to this proposition
if we take " produce " literally to imply a beginning
in time. Perhaps it means simply, " It cannot be
proved, but that, given the existence of anything,
the existence of God is proved." We should then
liave to see in it simply an assertion of the classical
argument for a necessary Being : "If anything
exists, an absolutely necessary Being exists : now I,
at least, exist : therefore an absolutely necessary
Being exists/' If we take the " is produced "
literally, we may suppose it to mean that, if you
once admit the real beginning of anything, a being
such as God is commonly supposed to be, might have
a beginning, and you could not prove the necessity
of any eternal, uncreated Being. Nothing that really
is can possibly have a beginning. Nicholas is here
denying the Aristotelian doctrine of corruption. Or
it is just possible (as my friend Mr. Webb suggests)
that the argument relied on was the following
sophism : " Aliqua res est producta, Deus est aliqua
res, ergo Deus est productus." But Nicholas' tone
does not suggest that he was indulging in mere
logical trifling of this kind.

(25) " It cannot evidently be shown but that
anything you like is eternal."

[" Non potest evidenter ostendi, quin quelibet res sit eterna."]

Here, again, Nicholas is denying the Aristotelian,
or what he takes to be the Aristotelian, doctrine of
corruption. Nothing that really exists can begin or
cease to be.

(26) " If bread be proved to exist, it cannot
evidently be shown that there is anything there
which is not an accident."

[" Pane demonstrate non potest evidenter ostendi, quod ibi sit
aliqua res, que non sit accidens."]

2l6

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

We might see in these words merely a continuation
of the former line of thought : a denial of any
substance in material things of either the perman-
ent elSos or the permanent vXtj in material things.
But it is possible that there is a more special and
subtle reference to the dogma of Transubstantiation.
The orthodox doctrine was, of course, that the
substance of the body and blood of Christ took the
place of the substance of the bread and wine, which
last was destroyed by consecration, the accidents of
the bread remaining unchanged. Nicholas objects :
'" You admit that after consecration there is no
substance beneath the accidents of bread : how do
you know there was any before : why may there not
have been nothing but accidents ? " It is significant
that this speculation is tenderly dealt with, being
only revoked as false, not as blasphemous or even
heretical : there is no denial of a miraculous change,
but merely the assertion that the body and blood of
Christ present in the Eucharist may, after all, be
only accidents, like the accidents of bread and wine.
At all events, this possible application of Nicholas'
thesis to the Sacrament of the altar may be a reason
for its condemnation : if you deny Substance, you
necessarily deny change of Substance.

(27) " It cannot be said without a self-contradic-
tion, which the propounder of such a proposition
may be driven to admit, that everything in the world
is produced," i.e., the fact of creation cannot be
proved, and even involves self-contradiction.

[" Potest dici sine contradictione, ad quam quis possit duel,
quod omnis res de mundo est producta."]

Here it is scarcely possible to doubt that a " non "
has dropped out before " potest " : if we take the
words as they stand, they must mean " if you insist
that anything has a real beginning, everything may
have had such a beginning."

(28) " This consequence is not evident : ' A is

217

GOD AND MAN

produced, therefore there is or was someone who
produced A/ " i.e. if creation or a beginning of the
world is admitted, that does not prove a Creator.

[" Hec consequentia non est evidens : a est productum, igitur
aliquis producens a est vel fuit."]

(29) " These consequences are not evident : * The
act of understanding exists : therefore the Under-
standing (" intellectus ") exists. The act of volition

exists : therefore the Will exists/ "

/

[" Iste consequentie non sunt evidentes : actus intelligendi est :
ergo intellectus est. Actus volendi est : igitur voluntas est."]

Here, once more, I need hardly stop to point out
the parallels in Hume in Hume and all his natural-
istic followers, and in some who are not Naturalists.

(30) " The proposition cannot be disproved that
all things which appear are true."

[" Non potest evidenter ostendi, quin omnia, que apparent,
sint vera."]

If we suppose that by " true " he means " that
which may truly be said to exist," Nicholas might
secure the august support of Mr. Bradley, though
both Mr. Bradley and Nicholas might perhaps both
of them have found it a little difficult to explain the
difference between a Reality which exists only in its
appearances and an appearance which exists only in
Reality.

(31) " Contradictories mean the same thing."
[" Contradictoria ad invicem idem significant."]

In this case I will not even venture to name the
real or apparent modern parallel. I will only say
that in Nicholas this must be, I suppose, pure
scepticism. There is no " higher unity " in the back-
ground to justify human Reason of its children in the
last resort.

218

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

(32) " God and the creature (or created world) are
not anything."

[" Deus et creatura (non stint ali)quid."j

Here I don't pretend to catch the exact meaning.
As the official censor's description is merely " false
and scandalous according to the sound of the words,"
I suppose they cannot have meant quite what they
sound. They cannot have meant a flat denial of
God's existence in the popular sense of the words.
Possibly the meaning is something like the famous
" If God existed, he would not be. God." God is
virep ovaias, an idea which Nicholas may very well
have got from the pseudo-Dionysius. The doctrine
is probably the same which he elsewhere expresses
by saying " ' God is ' and ' God is not ' mean the
same, though in a different manner or sense." God
and the creature both have being, but they have it in
different senses (not univoce but equivoce), so that in
the sense in which you assert it of the creature it
cannot be asserted of God, and vice versa. There is,
then, ho one thing which each of them can be said
to be. 1

On examination before the Cardinal, Nicholas
made an admission which throws a further light on
the general drift of his opinions. He is accused of
saying that " concerning things almost no certainty
can be had through natural appearances ; yet
moderate certainty could in a short time be secured
if men would turn their mind to things, and not to
the understanding of Aristotle and the commen-
tator," i.e. of course, Averroes. Averroes the
Commentator was, it must be remembered, in the
medieval Schools, as much the officially recognised
and prescribed authority as Averroes the original
thinker, and the Averroism which he produced, were
the typical representatives of all heresy and infidelity.
The movement which Occam inaugurated, and of

est, Deus non est, penitus idem significant, licet [alio modo].

219

GOD AND MAN

Nicholas represents (we may say) the extrem-
ist development, was a great revolt against Aristotle
and the systems of Philosophy and Theology which
the great Dominican Doctors, Albert the Great and
Thomas Aquinas, had built upon the foundation of
his teaching with such modifications, of course, as
the requirements of medieval orthodoxy demanded.
I may remark, in passing, that the germs of the
movement were undoubtedly to be found in the
teaching of Roger Bacon, like Occam a member of
the Franciscan Order and of the University of
Oxford. Many of the supplementary charges against
Nicholas are simply directed against his rejection of
various features of the Aristotelian or Thomist
Philosophy ; but it is to be observed that these he
did not, like the former, admit in all cases to be
correctly reported. There is a general charge of
maintaining that the arguments of Aristotle could be
met by arguments of equal probability ; a general
-accusation of disparaging those who studied Aristotle
" to decrepit old age," and " to such an extent that,
when a friend of truth like himself came and made
his trumpet to sound so to awake sleepers from their
Asleep, they were much aggrieved, and rushed upon
him, as it were, armed for a mortal fray." (This is
mildly condemned as " presumptuous.") He is
charged with denying that " things " could be
.generated or corrupted, 1 and with declaring that the
idea of corruption involved a contradiction. All
change hi natural things was, he held, merely due to
local motion, to aggregation or dispersal of atoms
a doctrine which was probably objected to, not so
much on account of its materialistic tendency, diffi-
cult to reconcile with the sceptical Idealism of other
theses, as because it denied that corruption was the
putting on and off by matter of the " forms " which
really, according to Aristotelian orthodoxy, made

J Res absolute pennanentes, de quibus dicitur communiter quod gene-
rantur et corrumpuntur, sunt eterne sive sint substantie sive accidentia.

22O

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

things what they were. Another charge against
Nicholas is his anticipation of the /corpuscular theorjr
of light, and his assertion that light has velocity 1
another trace of the influence of Roger Bacon..
He is also accused of denying the Thomist doctrine
of Perception, the idea of " visible and intelligible-
species/' Moreover, he had issued a presumptuous-
notice that he would lecture on the Politics of"
Aristotle, and would correct whatever needed correc-
tion in his account of the just and the unjust. One
of the things in Aristotle apparently which needed
such correction was the idea that theft was always-
wrong. The negative instance which he produced
was the case of a well-born youth who finds someone^
willing to instruct him " in all the speculative
Science that can be had about created things " for a.
consideration of a hundred pounds, which the youth
could not obtain without theft. It being always,
right to do whatever is well pleasing to God, and it.
being well pleasing to God for a man to acquire his-
own perfection, theft might be in this case permitted..
It was unfortunate for Nicholas that he lived before
the great days of Probabilist Casuistry, when perhaps.
such a doctrine might have passed for orthodox.
But, in spite of his attacks on Aristotle, it is pretty
clear that Nicholas, like most independent thinkers-
of the Middle Ages, was himself a good deal influenced
by Aristotle or the Averroistic interpretation of him,
a much more genuine Aristotle in some ways than
the Averroism of the Thomists. Although among
his comprehensive doubts is to be found the doubt
whether anything material existed from all eternity,.
he is also accused of asserting in several forms the
eternity of the world. 2 In the assertion that the

nichil aliud est quam quedam corpora (que nata) sunt sequi
motum soils, seu etiam alterius corporis luminosi, ita quod fit per motum
localem talium corporum advenientium ad presentiam corporis luminosi..
Et si dicatur quod non potest fieri per motum localem, quia in instanti fit,
respondet, quod ymo fit in tempore sicut sonus, licet non percipiamus quod
fit subito.

a lsti conclusioni, quod res permanentes sunt eterne, magis est assentien-
dum quam, etc. 22 T

GOD AND MAN

acts of our soul are eternal * it is impossible not to
recognise the characteristic Averroist doctrine of the
Unity of the active intellect, which carried with it a
denial of personal Immortality which was, of course,
the genuine Aristotelian doctrine, though all the
energies of the orthodox Aristotelians were concen-
trated upon the refutation of it. The accuser goes
on to interpret this as meaning that he held the
individual intellect to be always active, that the
individual's thought is always actual, never potential,
adding that by that position the whole third book of
Aristotle's " De Anima" is undermined (cessat).
What he probably meant to assert was that there is
no real difference between the Divine and the
human intellect. It was admitted that the Divine
intellect was always eVepyeia, actus purus, and
Nicholas asserted that the same might be said of the
liuman intellect, since there was no intellect in man
which was not identical with that one actual Intel-
lect. Nicholas' accusers were, perhaps, not far
wrong in saying that this involved the virtual denial
of that most difficult of Aristotle's conceptions, the
" passive intellect," which is mortal and merely
human, as contrasted with the active intellect which
is eternal and impersonal, and yet is never by
Aristotle himself explicitly identified with the Divine
vous which dwells outside the spheres. Another
thesis imputed to him bears out my interpretation ;
it runs : " The intellect which is now present to me,
will afterwards be present to another subject ; " in
other words, " Intellect, the higher active intellect is
.always one and the same, is impersonal, the same in
one individual and another." Another rather ob-
scure article seems directed against the Thomist
doctrine that the principium individuationis is in
matter, in rejecting which Nicholas follows the
Scotists. The assertion that the Universe is perfect,
alike as a whole and in all its parts and therefore

a Actus anime nostre sunt eterni.
222

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

there can be no real passing from being to not being
seems to be also Averroistic.

Averroism, as has been suggested, carried with it
the denial of personal Immortality, but our Philo-
sopher seems to have made an attempt to reconcile
the doctrine with a rationalised version of future
rewards and punishments. " When the atomic
corpuscles (i.e. of the individual's material organism)
are segregated at death, there remains a certain
spirit, which is called intellect, and another which is
called sense, and these spirits, as in the good men
they were in the best possible disposition, will be for
infinite time (infinities) according as those individual
corpuscles shall be congregated, and thus in this the
good man will be rewarded, and the bad man pun-
ished, because for all eternity, when the congregation
of its atoms is repeated, it will always have its own
good or bad disposition. Or (he says) it may be
otherwise put thus that these two spirits of good
men, when their subject is said to be corrupted, are
made present to another subject composed of more
perfect atoms. And thus, since such a subject is of
greater flexibility and perfection, therefore intellig-
ibles come more frequently than formerly to them." 1
This is obscure ; the text is perhaps a corrupt version
of a not wholly fair or intelligent report of a difficult
speculation ; but I would suggest that the idea is
that, though the individual body perishes, another
body arises in which the particular combination of
atoms is repeated and thereby a new human spirit
(or new manifestation of the one eternal and divine

1 (Premiatio) bonorum et punitio malorum per hoc fit, quia quando
corpo(ra athomalia) segregantur, remanet quidam spiritus, qui dicitur
in(tellectus, et alius) qui dicitur sensus, et isti spiritus sicut in bono s(e
habebant in optima) dispositione, sic se habebunt infinities secundum quod
(ilia individua infinities congregabuntur, et sic in hoc bonus premia(bitur,
malus autem) punietur, quia infinities quando iterabitur congreg(atio
suorum atho)malium habebit semper suam malam dispositionem. Vel
(potest), dicit, aliter poni, quia illi duo spiritus bonorum, quando dicitur
corrumpi suppositum eorum. fiunt presentes alteri supposito constitute ex
athomis perfectioribus. Et tune, cum tale suppositum sit majoris flexionis
t perfectionis, idcirco intelligibilia magis quam prius veniunt ad eos.

223

GOD AND MAN

Spirit) comes into existence which is yet in a sense
continuous with the former, and which enjoys
superior intellectual insight, a nearer approach to the
beatific vision, in consequence of the spiritual im-
provement effected in the life of that formes body.
There seems to be an attempt to combine the
assertion of the denial of personal Immortality in the
strict metaphysical sense with a virtual assertion of
it sufficient for ethical purposes reminding one very
much of what we are told is the really orthodox
interpretation of the Buddhistic doctrine known as
Karma. This interpretation seems to be confirmed
by the thesis that " subjects return in the same
number in consequence of the return of the super-
celestial bodies to the same position." 1 When the
heavenly bodies return to the same positions, souls
return to the re-collected atoms of their former
bodies. The expression seems to point to something"
like the wild theory that history repeats itself at
intervals, which is, after all, only an exaggeration of
the genuinely Aristotelian doctrine that the human
race (like every other species) is eternal, and that
periods of civilisation and of barbarism have gone on
succeeding one another from all eternity. Nicholas'
speculation seems to be a crude attempt to account
for the different characters of men by a sort of
semi-physical attraction which nobler souls exert
upon the noble examples or ideals (exemplaria) : it
is an attempt to reconcile a rather materialistic
predestinarianism with a real and intrinsic difference
between different characters ; the soul is necessarily
determined to act by its ^avraala of the end, but the
<f>avTacria of a noble end comes by necessity to the
noble soul. Here is the strange passage : " Just as
the vile elements go to the centre, and earthly
elements to the earth on account of homogeneity,
while fire gravitates to fire and so with other like

1 Supposita redeunt eodem numero per re(ditum corporum) super-
celestimn ad eundem situm.

224

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

noble bodies ; so it appears that to noble souls there
come noble examples, to vile ones vile examples, and
those which are of the earth speak earthly things.
Whence such an advent of noble or vile examples (I
read ' exemplarium ' for ' exemplaris ') seems to
testify to the perfection or imperfection of the
souls, for such examples, as he says, do not come
except on account of homogeneity." I have trans-
lated " unigeneitas " by homogeneity, because in
English " unigeneity " would hardly sound intel-
ligible, but it is probable that the Philosopher is
trying to reconcile the absolute Unity or Identity of
the active intellect in all with the existence of differ-
ent characters in different men by speaking of an
attraction exercised by the animal and mortal soul
in the nobler individuals upon the forms eternally
present in the universal vovs or God. " Exemplaria "
is not, of course, the usual scholastic Latin for the
Platonic Ideas, but I think this must be the meaning-
here.

I will not weary you with the remaining theses,
most of which are a repetition in various forms of
those already examined, but will just mention two-
ethical tenets which appear in the supplementary list
of articles sent from Paris. One is that a man ought
to love more than himself a neighbour who is better
than himself ; x the other that God may command a
rational creature to hate Himself, and that the
creature, if he obeyed, would earn more merit than
if he loved God, since he would do this with greater
effort and with more contrariety to his own inclina-
tion. Here the Ethics which make all Morality lie
in obedience to the arbitrary will of God seem oddly
combined with a theory that merit lies in self-sacri-
fice pushed, it would seem, to the point of violating
one's own higher nature. The doctrine, so under-
stood, may be regarded as a sort of reductio ad
absurdum of Kant, if we substitute the Practical

1 Quilibet plus tene(tur diligere proxim)um meliorem se quam seipsum.
P 225

GOD AND MAN

Heason for God, and some of the commandments of
Kant's Practical Reason are perhaps scarcely more
eccentric than those which Nicholas speculatively
regards as possible in God. Perhaps it is not fanciful
to see in this an extravagant antagonism to Aristotle's
doctrine of the true ^tAauTia.

How much did Nicholas really believe of all these
sceptical suggestions ? We began by comparing him
to Berkeley ; we soon found that he had anticipated
Hume's extension of Berkeley's doubts from the
unthinking to the thinking substance (so far as the
individual soul is concerned) ; and eventually we
found that some of his doubts almost carried him
"beyond the position of the great sceptic. His
scepticism reaches its culmination in the article
" This is a first principle, and there is no other : ' If
something is, something is.' "* It will be observed
that all that he generally asserts is that this or that
cannot be proved : and some of his problematical
suggestions are scarcely consistent with others.
Some of them, again, are inferences deduced from
the propositions of his opponent, Friar Bernard of
Arezzo. It is, however, clear enough that Nicholas'
speculation is a development of the Nominalism of
Occam ; the condemnation of Nicholas was accom-
panied by a general condemnation of the whole
Nominalist school, a school which flourished especi-
ally in Oxford, in the Franciscan Order, and among
the English and Germans who formed the English
nation at Paris a school whose political tendencies,
as exhibited by Occam and John of Jandun (to whom
we must add the Italian Marsilius of Padua) made it
particularly obnoxious to the Roman Curia. But the
School of Occam was not sceptical in the religious
sense of the word. If reason was discredited, it was
only to make way for faith. Occam was not even
in a theological sense a particularly enlightened or
progressive thinker ; he was a Franciscan Friar, and

1 Hoc est primum principium et non aliud : si aliquid est, aliquid est.
226

NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

a supporter or originator of many theological ideas
less enlightened than the Aristotelian orthodoxy of
the great Dominican School. With regard, there-
fore, to the more theologically destructive of
Nicholas' theses, there is no reason to suppose that
Nicholas meant any more than is meant by those
modern champions of Religion who seek to my own
mind suicidally to disparage Reason in the interests
of Faith. He is nearer to the position of Mr. Balfour
than to that of either Hume or Berkeley. In so far
as he attacks the Thomist dogmatism the inter-
mediaries of sensation, the Thomist doctrine of form
and matter, generation and corruption his doubts
probably represent deliberate convictions. He
.shared the Occamist tendency to Empiricism, to
^Nominalism, to Sensationalism, to Utilitarianism,
and thought that there was nothing dangerous to the
Faith in these tendencies. But there is no reason to
doubt that the Canon and Dean of Metz was a sincere
Theist and Christian. At the same time there are
indications that in some directions his doubts carried
him beyond the position of his Master, and that he
was really seeking his way to a position which would
have been difficult to reconcile even with the more
fundamental requirements of medieval Orthodoxy.
His Predestinarianism, a point on which he differed
from Occam, was no doubt got from Bradwardine,
who was implicitly hit by several of Clement's
anathemas a fact, however, which did not stand in
the way of his consecration as Primate of all England
two years later by the same Pontiff. But there are
traces of an Averroism which goes beyond mere
theological Predestinarianism, and which is suggest-
ive of the thinly- veiled Naturalism or Materialism of
the Italian Averroists, who flourished especially at
Padua. Yet, the obscure speculation about future
punishment shows that he had not consciously
acquiesced in the Pantheistic Weltanschauung of
"the avowed Averroists, but was struggling to recon-

227

GOD AND MAN

cile a Theistic and Christian view of the Universe
with tendencies of thought which would, if freely
indulged, have carried him in a very different direc-
tion. With regard to the most interesting point of"
all his suggestion that matter may have no inde-
pendent existence, it is difficult to be sure whether it
really means " the independent existence of matter
cannot be proved, although every sensible man
believes in it," or " the independent existence of
matter is a gratuitous, unreasonable, and indeed
uninteUigible and self -contradictory hypothesis.""
After all, the same doubt attaches to the enquiry
about the private Weltanschauung of Hume himself..
On the whole it is difficult to suppose that the strong
tendency to explain everything by changes of posi-
tion in material particles could co-exist with a
thorough-going Idealism. Modern Idealism majr
accept an atomic explanation of the Universe as a.
convenient methodological assumption of Physics ;
but it is doubtful whether a Medieval would have
succeeded in being at once an Atomist in Physics and
an Idealist in Metaphysics. It is more probable that
his state of mind was " You can't prove the existence
of Matter, and yet we all believe it ; in the same
way it is impossible to prove the creation of the
world and many other distinctively Christian doc-
trines, and yet we may accept them on the testimony
of the Bible or of the Church or of subjective reli-
gious emotion." The probability of this interpreta-
tion is increased by the fact that Nicholas' position
on this matter was an inference from positions of his
opponent. 1

Friar Bernard had, it appears, maintained that
" though from the fact of vision it cannot be inferred
that the object seen exists, because the vision may
be brought into being by a supernatural cause, or
preserved by it, nevertheless because an object has-

*" In lumine natural! non possumus esse certi, cum apparentia nostra
de existentia objectorum extra, est vera vel falsa, quia uniformiter, ut
dicitis, representat rem esse, sive sit, sive non sit " (d'Argentrt, I, p. 358).

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NICHOLAS DE ULTRICURIA

placed there by natural causes, the general
influence of the first cause (primi agentis) expressly
concurring, such an inference may be drawn/' 1
Nicholas argues very reasonably that if it is admitted
ihat a supernatural cause might produce an appear-
ance of whiteness without a white object being there,
no knowledge of the laws of Nature can tell us for
certain that on a particular occasion this was not the
case. Nicholas here champions the certainty of
immediate perception which his opponent had
denied ; he had defended in the Hall of the Sorbonne
the proposition that " I am evidently certain con-
cerning the objects of the five senses and about my
own acts." In what sense he used the word " ob-
jects " must remain doubtful. In any case his
.scepticism subsequently went further.

Two passages in the record of Nicholas' examina-
tion before the Cardinal throw some light upon the
spirit in which their theses were maintained. The
whole discussion, he tells us, grew out of an agree-
ment to dispute with the Minorite Friar Bernard of
Arezzo, upon the basis of the principle of contradic-
tion as formulated by Aristotle, how much we could
be certain of, and he pleads that all he had contended
was that these startling assertions of his could not be
shown to involve any contradiction ; and in another
place he is accused of inventing a " vulpine "
excuse, and saying that his speculation about the
future judgment was put forward as a mere possi-
bility, and that it was, after all, less probable than
the received view, " and so, he says " (runs the
document) " that we should adhere to the law of
Christ, and believe that reward and punishment take
place in the way in which it is expressed in the
sacred law." In another place, however, Nicholas
declares that he wrote his tractate under a sense of
duty, under the belief that " further delay was dis-

1 Ibid., p. 358. I read " quia " for " quin." Bernard's position reminds
us of Descartes, who inferred the existence of Matter from the veracity of
God.

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GOD AND MAN

pleasing to God," from which the official scribe draws
the inference that he claimed divine inspiration a
claim which is made into a distinct article of con-
demnation and marked " presumptuosum in se,
suspectum, quoad dicentem periculosum et revocan-
dum." As this claim was not particularly calculated
to propitiate his judges, we may infer that in
Nicholas we have to do not with a mere spinner of
ingenious metaphysical cobwebs designed to startle
and attract attention, but with a sincere religious
thinker who really did anticipate lines of thought
which, followed out in different directions, have
constituted the principal subject of discussion amongf
modern Philosophers. If he did not actually antici-
pate the positions of Berkeley or of Hume or of
Spinoza, he saw that such positions were possible,
and saw the difficulty of meeting any of them, and
that is a considerable achievement for a Parisian
Doctor of the Fourteenth Century. I trust I shall have
convinced my audience that Nicholas of Ultricuria is
at least deserving of the passing notice which he has
so far failed to attain at the hands of historians of
Philosophy.

230

X
BISHOP BUTLER 1

UP till a few years ago Butler's Analogy still held its
place among the few books usually prescribed for
Ordination Examinations. It has certainly begun
most rightly to disappear. To set before candidates
for the ministry Butler's Analogy as a treasure-house
of answers to the modern sceptic is really like bringing
up a medical student upon the works of Hippocrates
or of Galen. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate
the obsoleteness of Butler in many ways especially
of that second part of the Analogy in which he deals
with Revealed Religion. Why, then, read a paper
on Butler if he be dead ? Had he not better be
decently buried too ? I reply that I have chosen him
for two reasons : (i) I thought it would be interesting
to ask the question " Why does Butler's Apologetic
strike the modern reader as so thoroughly out of
date ? " and I thought that the mere statement of
these reasons would help to suggest the sort of
apologetic by which it must be replaced. (2) Though
Butler as a whole is out of date, there are elements
in his thought which are still of real value, and I
should like to call attention to them. I should be
far from saying that Bishop Butler is no longer worth
reading, or even that his works are of purely his-
torical interest. For the young student who has
perhaps hardly read another work of Christian
Apologetic or Christian Philosophy, it is worse than
useless to put into his hands a collection of good
replies to objections which are not now made and
untenable replies to those that are still urged. But
such a book may be very instructive to the student
sufficiently acquainted with more modern modes of
thought to be able to recognise where the old apolo-
gist's arguments are, and where they are not, still
available.

1 Reprinted from the Modern Churchman, Vol. XVI. pp. 678-694 (March,.
1927).

231

GOD AND MAN

Butler's contribution to Theology may be studied
under three heads, (i) There is the first part of the
Analogy dealing with Natural Theology ; (2) there
is the second part dealing with Revealed Theology ;
and (3) there are the Fifteen Sermons which are
chiefly concerned with Moral Philosophy.

I will deal with these three parts in order. But
first I must say a word as to the argument of the
Analogy as a whole. This is often misconceived.
People vaguely suppose that Butler aimed at pointing
out analogies between Natural and Revealed Reli-
gion. This mistake is sufficiently corrected by an
attentive reading of the title-page. The work is
styled : The Analogy of Religion Natural and
Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature.
Butler is not seeking to prove Revealed Religion by
showing the analogies which it exhibits to Natural
Religion. Both Natural Religion and Revealed
Religion are treated as things to be proved : and
Butler proposes to prove them by showing that what
were urged as objections both to Natural and
Revealed Religion might equally be made to what
nobody denied the constitution and course of
Nature. Now of course if by the constitution and
course of Nature Butler had meant nothing but the
actual facts of the Universe apprehended by the
senses, such a line of argument would be worth
nothing. If, for instance, it is objected that there is
a certain injustice or inequality or arbitrariness in
the Christian scheme of salvation, it is no answer to
say that similar injustices are included in the course
of nature, in the actual distribution of happiness and
misery, in our liability to undeserved injury or un-
merited help from our fellows and so on. The
modern doubter would of course reply : " Precisely
so, and that is why I do not believe either that your
scheme of salvation or that the course of nature
comes from a just and perfect God, or indeed from

232

BISHOP BUTLER

any God at all." But in Butler's time no one denied
that Nature implied a creative Mind an " intelligent
author of Nature/' as it was called. It was thought
obviously impossible that the world could start
itself. Given a Creator to start it, it could (as some
supposed) go on very well of itself, though it was
generally held further that the appearances of
design in human organisms pointed to the exertion
of occasional interference with the world-machine at
later periods. And particularly the appearance of
new species was held to be something that could not
possibly be accounted for by the laws of nature at
.all. Butler was able to assume that the existence
of a creative and intelligent mind was something
universally admitted. His opponents were not Athe-
ists or Agnostics, but Deists. Deism was a mode of
thought which was introduced by certain English
writers in the later half of the seventeenth century.
Lord Herbert of Cherbury is often spoken of as the
first of the Deists ; but the real impulse, I imagine,
came from the much more anti-religious Thomas
Hobbes, though his view of the omnipotence of the
State compelled him to profess attachment to the
principles of the Church of England as by law
-established, and so made it impossible for him
formally to deny either the special truths of Christi-
anity or the more fundamental principles of Natural
Religion. Hobbes attended church because the law
required him to do so, but took the liberty to absent
himself .from the sermon. But the whole tendency
<of his thought was profoundly sceptical and anti-
Christian.

It may be suggested that, if the existence of God
was admitted, nothing remained to be proved as
regards what was called at the time Natural Religion.
But that was not the case with at least some of the
Deists. Most of their leading writers, indeed men
like Collins, Toland and Chubb were professed
believers in the righteousness of God, in the

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GOD AND MAN

providential government of the world, and in future
rewards and punishments. What they denied was
the miraculous interference with the course of
Nature, the special revelation of God in the Old and
New Testaments, and the special doctrines of
Christianity. But there were others who went
further and denied that there was any reason to
think of God as righteous, that there could be any
communication between the divine and the human
mind even in the voice of conscience, any meaning"
in worship, any grounds for belief in a future life.
It must be remembered that, though the objections
'to established religious ideas found expression in the
little group of deistical writers, Deism was a mode of
thought which was propagated rather in conversation
than by formal treatises, among more or less culti-
vated men of fashion than among philosophers and
professed students, in coffee-houses and drawing-
rooms rather than in universities or the studies of
serious thinkers. Even the deistical writers were
not academical teachers or men of great learning, but
laymen sometimes cultivated laymen, at other
times quite self-taught.

The situation is amusingly expressed by Bishop
Berkeley :

" Lysicles smiled and said he believed Euphranor
had figured to himself philosophers in square caps
and long gowns, but thanks to these happy times
the reign of pedantry was. over. Our philosophers
are of a different kind from those awkward students
who think to come at knowledge by poring on
dead languages and old authors, or by sequestering
themselves from the cares of the world to meditate
in solitude and retirement. They are the best-bred
men of the age, men who know the world, men of
pleasure, men of fashion, and fine gentlemen.

" Euph. I have some small notion of the people
you mention, but should never have taken them
for philosophers.

234

BISHOP BUTLER

" Cn. Nor would anyone else till of late. The
world was long under a mistake about the way to-
knowledge, thinking it lay through a tedious course
of academical education and study. But among"
the discoveries of the present age one of the
principal is the finding out that such a method
doth rather retard and obstruct than promote
knowledge.

" Lys. I will undertake that a lad of fourteen,
bred in the modern way, shall make a better figure,
and be more considered in any drawing-room or
assembly of polite people, than one at four-and-
twenty, who hath lain by a long time at school and
college. He shall say better things, in a better
manner, and be more liked by good judges.

" Euph. Where doth he pick up this improve-
ment ?

" Cri. Where our grave ancestors would never
have looked for it, in a drawing-room, a coffee-
house, a chocolate-house, at the tavern, or groom-
porter's. In these and like fashionable places of
resort it is the custom for polite persons to speak
freely on all subjects, religious, moral or political.
So that a young gentleman who frequents them is-
in the way of hearing many instructive lectures,
seasoned with wit and raillery, and uttered with
spirit." 1

It was objections that passed current in circles of
this kind rather than in solemn philosophical assem-
blies that Butler and the long line of Apologists of
which he has become the most classical had really
to deal with. And in these circles it is probable that
the more destructive kind of attack upon Christianity
was more frequent than in the guarded pages of the
Deistical writers. These assailants, so far as they
had any philosophical position at all, based them-
selves upon Hobbes' doctrine of universal selfishness.
Unlike the kinds of modern anti-Christianity with

1 Alciphron, Dial. I and II.

235

GOD AND MAN

^which we are most familiar, much of this fashionable
scepticism of George II 's time was frankly anti-moral
ioo. It was deliberately maintained that there was
no reason why a man should not gratify all his selfish
passions and inclinations except in so far as the
community for its own purposes found it necessary
to create, by means of punishment, selfish induce-
ments to restrain them. The Deity which this sort
of Deism admitted was (as Carlyle expressed it) very
much of an " absentee Deity." For these reasons
that perfunctory admission of an " intelligent author
of Nature " which Butler was able to assume did not
.always establish anything which he or we could
regard as amounting to a Natural Theology or
Natural Religion. But his plan is to start with
simply this achnission, and to argue that the admitted
and undeniable behaviour of this external rule of
the Universe, as exhibited by the course of nature,
exhibits analogies to the action which was attributed
to Him by the scheme both of Natural and Revealed
Religion. Upon the premisses of Butler's opponents
much of the argument is good. But the mode of
thought to which it is a reply has completely passed
away. The writings of the English Deists, it must be
remembered, were the real source of the French
" Illumination," of the ideas of the Encyclopaedists.
The mere negations of Deism exercised more influence
on the Continent than in the British Isles. Voltaire
was very much the kind of Deist whom Butler
attacks. The Deism which can recognise so very
personal a Deity as is implied in the sudden creation
of man by a divine fiat, and yet scoffs at the notion
of His benevolence or His justice, at the idea of
moral obligation or of a future life, is practically
non-existent at the present day. The tendency of
modern philosophy is towards the opposite pole of
religious thought ; some form of Pantheism, not
Deism, is now the alternative to the Christian
conception of God. So far as the Deistic conception

336

BISHOP BUTLER

of God exists, it is among orthodox Christians who*
are often accused by philosophers of Deism on account
of their too anthropomorphic conception of God and
their too external a view of the relation between
God and the world : but the Deism of the Voltairian
type the belief in a non-moral starter of a clock-
work Universe is an unknown variety of opinion, at
least in cultivated and philosophical circles. You.
might possibly find something a little like it in the
vague, inarticulate theological systems which lurk
at the bottom of but slightly educated minds alien-
ated from all recognised forms of religious thought
and yet not deliberately atheistic or agnostic. In
meeting any higher level of non-theistic thought than
this, Butler's formal argument is now completely
unavailable. What Butler assumes as beyond the
region of controversy is just what to modern doubters-
requires to be proved.

Nevertheless it must not be supposed that the
first part of the Analogy is worthless. It is a piece
of very serious thinking. Much of Butler's line of
thought is still valuable against the opposite tendency
towards a non-moral, non-religious Pantheism. For
a mind which has once accepted, or which is at least
inclined to accept, the notion that the ultimate
principle of things must be spiritual, the fundamental
difficulty of accepting the Christian conception of
God lies largely in the old problem of the existence
of evil. At the present day anyone who is disposed
to believe that the Universe may best be thought of
in terms of Mind, will almost certainly be disposed
to assume that, if God is the ultimate source or
ground both of the physical Universe and of the
human mind, He must be the source also of our
moral ideas, and that therefore we are justified in
attributing to Him those moral qualities which are
approved by our moral consciousness, and to argue
further that the purpose of the Universe must be one
which commends itself to that moral consciousness.

237

GOD AND MAN

To put it more simply, those who are disposed to
"believe in God at all, will naturally feel impelled to
think of Him as righteous, benevolent, loving. The
great obstacle to such a belief now, quite as much as
in Butler's day, is the existence of evil. If Theism
cannot in some sense account for the existence of
evil, either the modern man will reject the arguments
"which would otherwise incline him to the theistic
view and fall back upon Agnosticism, or (if he is too
much of a metaphysician to acquiesce in such
intellectual bankruptcy) he will feel driven to believe
in an Absolute a universal Being who is thought of
in some sense as spiritual, but not as personal or
moral : he will declare that our moral distinctions do
not exist from the point of view of the Absolute, that
He or it (for some of the believers in a non-moral
Absolute prefer to speak of this ultimate principle
in the neuter) is " beyond good and evil," that the
Absolute of Philosophy is not the God of Religion,
and so will treat the whole Christian conception of
God and His relation to the Universe either with the
hostility of a Nietzsche or with contemptuous
patronage as a crude, childish, popular presentation
of things perhaps inevitable, perhaps useful, for
emotional and devotional purposes, perhaps even as
having a sort of intellectual justification on the level
of popular thought but which cannot be seriously
accepted as a representation of objective truth. And
in dealing with this difficulty Butler may still give
us some help. The most valuable and still living
part of the Analogy is in the chapter on " A State of
Probation, as intended for Moral Discipline and
Improvement." Although in the Sermons Butler
was very much inclined to speak in the ordinary
utilitarian way, to treat virtue as consisting certainly
in the promotion of happiness practically identified
with pleasure, in the Analogy he sees the difficulty
of vindicating the ways of God to man on such a
basis :

238

BISHOP BUTLER

" Some men seem to think the only character of
the Author of Nature to be that of simple absolute
benevolence. This, considered as a principle of
action and infinite in degree, is a disposition to
produce the greatest possible happiness, without
regard to persons' behaviour, otherwise than as
such regard would produce higher degrees of it.
And supposing this to be the only character of
God, veracity and justice in him would be nothing
but benevolence conducted by wisdom. Now
surely this ought not to be asserted, unless it can
be proved." 1

Pull as he still is of the Eighteenth Century respect
ior the cold pursuit of self-interest, he does now
distinctly think of goodness as an end-in-itself, and
.at bottom he explains the presence of evil by the
fact that it must be supposed in ways only partially
intelligible to us to be a necessary means to the
.supreme purpose of creation, i.e. the production of
the greatest possible amount of human well-being
a well-being which includes the training and
discipline of character as well as happiness.

The greatest possible amount. This logically im-
plies a limit to the omnipotence of God, as popularly
understood. If God can only secure His good ends
~by causing some evil, it is clear that He is not
omnipotent in the popular sense of being able to do
anything and everything that we take it into our
heads to imagine. On the whole Butler recognises
this implication, though we could wish that he had
done so a little more boldly. One of Butler's charac-
teristic and ever-present thoughts is the ignorance
of man a thought so strongly held that it very
seriously clips the wings of philosophical speculations,
and might have the unintended effect of driving a
sceptically inclined reader into sheer agnosticism.
But Butler has much to say against the irrationality

1 Bk. I, eh. iii, 3, p. 54. The pagination given is that of Gladstone's
edition.

239

GOD AND MAN

of not following our .reason as far as it will carry us-
because it will not carry us farther. He insists upon
the fact that God governs the world through general
laws that we must not judge of each particular
piece of divine action as if it had no relation to other
acts : the world is a system or constitution in which
every part is constructed with some reference to<
other parts. At the present day he would have
called it an " organic whole." But this being so, we
must suppose that " there may be the wisest and
best reasons why the world should be governed by
general laws, from whence such promiscuous distri-
bution (of happiness and misery) perhaps must
follow" (p. 66). Among the consequences which,
would follow from a juster distribution of good and
evil in this life would be that we could not foresee
the consequences of our own acts, and as most of
our enjoyments are such as " we are, in some way or
other, instrumental in procuring ourselves, "and " this,
foresight could not be at all, were not the government
of the world carried on by general laws " : and " to
prevent all irregularities, or remedy them as they
arise, by the wisest and best general laws, may be
impossible in the nature of things " (p. 140). And
then he explicitly recognises that " Perhaps (perhaps,
is a very favourite word with Butler) there may be
some impossibilities in the nature of things which we
are unacquainted with " (p. 42). It is presumptuous.
" to imagine that the world might have been so
constituted as that there would not have been any
such thing as misery or evil" (p. 210). All this
really implies that there is a limit to the omnipotence
of God in the popular sense, and in the true sense if
omnipotence is, in the words used by Thomas.
Aquinas, " the power of doing all possible things."

I may add that the impossibility of the true end
of creation being secured without the permission of
evil is largely dependent, in Butler's view, upon the
necessity of free-will to virtue a free-will which he

240

BISHOP BUTLER

interprets in the popular sense of indeterminism
pushed to a point to which few modern philosophers
would follow him. In dealing with this subject he
shows absolutely no appreciation of the deterministic
case. The idea of determinism or universal necessity
is to Butler simply absurd. Philosophers have
differed, and perhaps will always differ, on this
question ; but a writer who thinks that determinism
can be easily answered shows that he is not a philo-
sopher of the first or even the second rank.

With all its defects, the argument of the first part
is a deeply impressive piece of writing. It is when
we come to the second part of the Analogy the part
which deals with Revelation-4that we feel how
completely the whole situation has changed since
Butler's day. And indeed the greatest difference
between Butler's position and any which could 1
possibly be adopted at the present day by any
philosophical mind lies in this hard and fast distinc-
tion between " Natural " and " Revealed Religion."
Butler assumes that all that he calls natural religion,,
all the knowledge which man can obtain by reason
or reflection, all the knowledge that ever was gained,,
whether by ancient philosophers or by the prophets
or the collective religious mind of religions other than
the Jewish and the Christian, involved no sort of
measure of revelation or self-communication of the
Divine Mind at all. There is, indeed, one exception
to this, for Butler was of course a great champion of
Conscience, and he does recognise that Conscience is
the will of God. But when he is contrasting Natural
and Revealed Religion even this is commonly for-
gotten. On the other hand, when he turns to the
Jewish and the Christian scriptures, he talks as if in
their contents nothing whatever was due to the
natural workings of the human minds, whether to
any sort of intuition or any sort of reflection or
inference nothing, again, to the influence of religious

Q 241

GOD AND MAN

or social emotion, of tradition or environment
or any other of the forces which a modern philosopher
would recognise as psychological causes, as distinct
from logical reasons, for religious belief. He does
not, indeed, formulate any strong theory as to the
infallibility of scriptural writers on matters of fact,
though he will never admit that they were actually
mistaken ; but as regards the religious content of
their message as regards the words of prophecy, for
instance he assumes that they were dictated by
God in the most direct, the most external, apparently
the most mechanical, manner conceivable. By
revelation he means the direct communication of
iruth from the divine to the human mind under the
guarantee of miracles. To a large extent this super-
natural communication of knowledge was a " repub-
lication of the religion of Nature " of the truths
which, partly as the result of a supposed original
revelation made in the infancy of the human race,
and partly as the result of independent thought and
reflection man might have discovered, and to some
extent did discover, for himself by the use of his
natural faculties such truths as the existence and
the goodness of God, the contents of the moral law,
the doctrine of future rewards and punishments.
But this Revelation did also contain the promulga-
tion of new truths and new commands not otherwise
discoverable as, for instance, that duty imposed
upon the Israelites of exterminating the Canaanites,
or the necessity of faith and baptism for salvation
revealed in the New Testament. Up to a point, he
does indeed insist strongly upon the rights of Reason :
he is very clear that we have no means of judging of
the truth of anything whatever except by means of
our Reason. Reason must judge of the fact that a
revelation has been made, i.e. that the alleged
miracles in fact occurred, and that they prove the
truth of all that was taught by any person by whom
the miracle was wrought. And even so, no alleged

242

BISHOP BUTLER

matter of revelation could be accepted if it involved
a contradiction or was opposed to some truth other-
wise sanctioned by Reason or by Conscience. But
practically this last admission is of very little value,
because any particular command, no matter how
.shocking to the moral feelings of mankind or opposed
to the general rule affirmed by Conscience, may
nevertheless be a real command of God and must be
obeyed. "If it were commanded, to cultivate the
principles, and act from the spirit, of treachery,
ingratitude, cruelty ; the command would not alter
the nature of the case, or of the action." But a
particular act, no matter how much condemned by
Conscience, may be commanded because in the
particular case an exception to the principles of
action approved by Conscience may in ways unknown
to us be conducive to the ends of Divine Providence.
For Samuel to have hated Agag we might suppose
would have been wrong : but it was his duty to hew
Jiirn in pieces before the Lord, loving him all the
lime. Moreover, Butler supposes " men have no
:right to either life or property, but what arises solely
irom the grant of God." Consequently (the illus-
tration is not Butler's ; I observe that he always
tactfully refrains from illustrations) the Israelites
were quite justified in cheating the Egyptians out of
their jewellery, and in slaughtering the inhabitants
of Canaan.

I need hardly say how completely this mode of
thinking is opposed to the best religious thought and
the best religious instincts of the average Christian
at the present day. Butler was as coldly rational-
istic I use the word in a rather popular sense as
any of the Deists whom he opposed. In his mode of
thinking, God never spoke to anyone but a Jew or a
Christian of the First Century. To suggest that
.something of the spirit of God moved in Socrates or
in Gautama (though men like Justin or Origen would
.heartily have admitted it), or for Wesley to think of

243

GOD AND MAN

himself as divinely commissioned to take the world
for his parish, would have been to Butler sheer
" enthusiasm." Everything turns upon the evidence
of miracles. Without miracles, no voice of God :
when miracles can be appealed to, there is Revela-
tion, no matter how improbable, absurd or immoral
the particular matter revealed, if only it escape-
formal contradiction or opposition to the moral law
as regards inward principle or motive. When he
comes to the evidence for miracles, the tests which
he proposes are of the most childishly inadequate
description. If a miracle is recorded by a historian
whom we have no positive reason to regard as.
dishonest, and we have no positive evidence against
it, we must accept the statement. It is presumptu-
ous, apparently, to ask when the writer lived, whether
he had any means of knowing the truth, or whether
his age was one in which there was a general disposi-
tion to accept miracles on little or no evidence-
Butler's principles of historical evidence would
compel him to accept all the miracles in Herodotus-
or in the Ada Sanctorum. He has no knowledge:
whatever as to the causes which tend to produce
belief in miracles. The only causes he recognises are-
enthusiasm or sheer lying. And enthusiasm is-
understood in a way which makes it hardly com-
patible with common sanity or common honesty.
Butler has no conception of the way in which stories-
of miracles actually got believed and accepted by
ancient chroniclers. He has no conception of the
large extent to which so-called miracles, through the
influence of mind on body in ways now obscurely
understood, and many other events commonly
called miraculous, may have actually occurred,
without any violation of the laws of nature. When
miracles broke out in Butler's own diocese of Bristol,,
he sent for John Wesley. We are told little of that
memorable interview between those typical repre-
sentatives of the Eighteenth Century the Bishop

244

BISHOP BUTLER

"who represented the rationalism which had hitherto
been dominant, and the Priest who represented the
enthusiasm (as Butler would have called it) which
was to usher in a new period in the history of religion.
.Butler's remark to Wesley is significant :

" Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revela-
tions and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing
a very horrid thing."

Butler's way of dealing with the matter was entirely
opposed to our modern canons of historical evidence.
We are not told that he instituted any enquiry
whatever into the truth of these reported cases.
Because they could not be accounted for by the
current accepted psychology and physiology of the
<iay, they must be rejected without enquiry, and put
down to " enthusiasm " or dishonesty. Since enthu-
siasm, though a regrettable aberration of the human
mind, could hardly be regarded as " horrid," we
must presume that he accounted for them by im-
posture on the part of others, and perhaps by
self-deception (such as that to which in one of his
sermons he attributes the conduct of Balaam) on the
part of John Wesley himself. If the miracle had
been revealed as having happened a few hundred
years after the event by an unknown writer who
wrote in Hebrew, he would have regarded it as
41 presumptuous " to question it. Butler could have
given no rational account of the difference of his
procedure in the two cases.

I have left myself hardly time to speak of Butler's
Fifteen Sermons on Christian Ethics: And yet this
is really his most important work. I have suggested
that to put Butler's Analogy into the hands of the
young student of theology is worse than useless.
On the other hand, when I taught Moral Philosophy
in Oxford, I always recommended men to begin by
reading Butler's Sermons, or some of them, and

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GOD AND MAN

Mill's Utilitarianism as the typical representatives of
the two classical schools of Moral Philosophy.
Butler is the typical champion of the authority of
Conscience the typical " Intuitionist." In many
respects Paley, though still essentially an Eighteenth-
Century theologian, was much in advance of Butler :
his ideas of historical evidence, for instance, are
much better. But Butler's great superiority to him
lies in the fact that he does recognise, as Paley does
not, the authority of Conscience. The best part of
the Sermons, indeed, is to my mind not so much the
ethics proper as the psychology. His refutation of
the hedonistic psychology of Hobbes of the doctrine
that every action is inspired by selfish or interested
motives represents a real advance in this region of
thought. Even to this day it is hardly possible to
point to anything better. His positive argument in
favour of the existence and authority of Conscience
is also powerful and convincing ; but his conception
of Conscience makes it too much of a piece of magic
or miracle. He does not merely recognise that the
idea of duty, the idea of right and wrong in general,
is one of the fundamental categories of human
thought, which can as little be explained by experi-
ence or the calculations of self-interest, or by mere
emotions or by the mere influence of education and
environment, as we can explain in such ways the
genesis of our knowledge of the mathematical axioms
or the laws of thought. He seems to think that
every particular question of right or wrong has to be
decided absolutely without any thought or calcula-
tion of consequences " by almost any fair man under
almost any circumstances " (the slight hesitation and
reserve are very characteristic of Butler). In the
development of the individual's ideas about right
and wrong absolutely nothing is allowed for the
influence of custom, tradition, environment, educa-
tion. He supposes that, because our fundamental
moral ideas are self-evident or intuitive, each and

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BISHOP BUTLER

every individual can claim absolute infallibility for
his own ideas of right and wrong in each particular
case, and that the moral ideas of all fair men at all
times in the world's history have always been the
same. The only possible causes of wrong ethical
judgments which he allows are superstition and
" self-deception," which last is, as he says, no real
exception. In Butler's time not so much was known
as to the actual variations of the moral standard as
in our own, but it is difficult to understand how such
a view could have survived the reading of Homer and
the Old Testament. Here again, as in his dealing
with revelation, we have to notice an entire absence
of the historical sense. He had no notion of evolu-
tion or development, whether in the sphere of
religion or of ethics. No doubt here the deficiencies
of Butler's thoughts were largely those of his age
of the sceptic no less than the orthodox.

Butler is also inclined to assume that our moral
judgments .are quite independent of any calculation
as to the social consequences of our actions. This is
more conspicuously so in the Dissertation entitled
" The Nature of Virtue," appended to the Analogy,
than in the earlier Sermons. In the Sermons he is
so far a utilitarian that he can say " that there is a
common end and interest of Society which each
particular is bound to promote in the sum of morals."
But he seems to think that by a kind of pre-estab-
lished harmony the judgments of Conscience will
always coincide with the dictates of utility. In the
Dissertation he is a more decided intuitionist, and
contends that some acts are pronounced right or
wrong by Conscience although it cannot be shown
that they must necessarily increase happiness. He
assumes (i) that if there is such a thing as Conscience
the judgment of the individual is always infallible,
and (2) that Conscience pronounces what particular
course of action is right or wrong without any
reference to its probable consequences. He assumes

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GOD AND MAN

that our first intuitive, half-instinctive judgment
upon the most complicated problem of conduct
prior to any reflection upon probable consequences
will be infallibly true. He is disposed to look upon
Conscience as a sort of penny-in-the-slot machine.
Not a moment's thought is necessary. Put in your
question : out jumps the answer ready-made, com-
plete, cut and dried. Here he is obviously wrong.
In some cases it is obvious that we must think of the
consequences of an action before we can pronounce
it right or wrong. Whether this is so in all cases is
still one of the most disputed points of moral philo-
sophy. That is a question which it would take too
long to discuss now. My own solution of the
problem would be briefly this. I should myself be
disposed to say that in all cases it is a duty to do
what will best promote true human well-being, but
that true human well-being does not mean the
greatest possible proportion of pleasure. The Utili-
tarian is right in saying " Acts are right in proportion
as they promote universal good " : he is wrong in
thinking that universal good means universal
pleasure. There are other goods besides pleasure,
and pleasures differ in kind.

To ascertain what the consequences of an act are
likely to be we must appeal to experience ; but
whether those consequences are truly good or not
must be judged by the moral consciousness, or (as
Butler would say) by Conscience, directly, immedi-
ately, intuitively. This is the true function of that
faculty in every man which, in Butler's impressive
language, " distinguishes between the internal prin-
ciples of his heart, as well as his external actions ;
which passes judgment upon himself and them ;
pronounces determinately some actions to be in
themselves just, right, good ; others to be in them-
selves evil, wrong, unjust ; which without being
consulted, without being advised with, magisterially
exerts itself, and approves or condemns him, the doer

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BISHOPBUTLER

of them, accordingly ; and which, if not forcibly
stopped, naturally and always of course goes on to
anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence which
shall hereafter second and affirm its own." It is not
on the morality of particular acts detached from
their consequences, but on the value of goods or
ends of acts that it was the true function of Conscience
to pronounce. Conscience is no less magisterial
because for its effectual exercise we must enquire
into what are the probable consequences of a pro-
posed action and how far it will or will not tend to
bring about that which conscience itself determines
to be the true good, the true end or ideal, of human
society. But I must not enter further into these
questions of Moral Philosophy.

It is time for me to attempt to answer the question
upon which I promised to say something---what light
does a study of Butler throw upon the Apologetics
which the needs of our day demand ? I trust that
question has been partly answered incidentally in
the course of my criticism upon Butler. Lack of
time forbids me to do more than summarise in a
very hasty and dogmatic manner the lessons which
I think we ought to learn from him.

(1) Butler was right in supposing that the special
Theology of the Christian Religion presupposes a
Natural Theology a Theology which commends
itself to the Reason and Conscience of man apart
from the authority of Christ or of the Old and New
Testaments. The first part of his Analogy especi-
ally his whole view of life as a state of discipline
may help us to construct that Natural Theology,
though we shall have to begin by giving reasons for
that belief in "an intelligent author of Nature "
which he for the most part assumes.

(2) We cannot in Butler's fashion draw a hard and
fast distinction between Revealed Religion and
Natural Religion. We shall have to recognise that

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GOD AND MAN

there are degrees of Revelation. God can never be
known to man except in so far as He reveals Himself.
Revelation does not exclude the use of Reason.
There is a measure of revelation in the teaching of
ancient philosophers and of religions other than the
Jewish or Christian ; and, on the other hand, we
cannot treat everything in the Old or New Testament
as infallible truth. We shall look upon the religious
history of the world as a progressive self-revelation
of God to the human mind, culminating in the
revelation through Christ a revelation which re-
quires to be itself developed and continued by the
work of the Holy Spirit in human souls, and in
particular in the society of Christ's followers.

(3) Whatever view we take of miracles, it is
impossible to vest the claims of Christ and of
Christianity wholly or even primarily upon the
attestation of miracles. In the present state of
criticism it is only when we have already accepted
Christ as in a unique and supreme sense the Revela-
tion of God that the question can even be raised
whether the abnormal events which accompanied
that life are attested by sufficient historical evidence,
and whether, so far as that is so, they must be
looked upon as actual interferences with the course
of nature by the fiat of Divine power, or whether
they may be regarded as extraordinary instances of
a control of the processes of physical nature which,
though in some sense abnormal, does not involve any
interference with law. However we answer this
question, the whole problem of miracles has become
to us from an evidential point of view of secondary
importance. The modern theologian, if he believes,
in miracles, will do so because he already believes in
Christ. And he may still believe in Christ even if
he does not believe in miracles. Those internal
evidences of the truth of Christianity which the
older Apologists were inclined to regard as secondary
will become to us primary. The chief ground for

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BISHOP BUTLER

our belief in Christ, and in the exceptional and
unique Incarnation of God in Christ, must lie in the
appeal which His teaching makes to the reason, the
conscience and the heart.

(4) Like Butler, or rather still more than Butler,
we must put the appeal to the authority of Conscience
in the forefront of our Apologetic. There are man}r
other lines of thought which lead up to the belief
in what Butler calls an " intelligent author of
Nature/' though His relation to the world will be
thought of in a way somewhat different from that
either of the orthodox or of the Deists of the
Eighteenth Century. But none of these lines of
thought throws any light upon His character except
the argument from Conscience. Our moral judg-
ments supply the only valid ground for thinking of
God as righteous, just, loving ; and, I may add, it
is only by assuming that our moral judgments are
as much a revelation of the ultimate nature of
Reality as the judgments of Natural Science that we
can justify the belief that because His ideal com-
mends itself in a supreme way to the Conscience of
Mankind, we may regard Christ as in a supreme
sense the Revealer of God.

(5) This same authority of Conscience must be the
chief ground of our belief in immortality. Butler
was not wrong in the importance which he assigned
to this belief, but we shall think of the future life
somewhat differently from him. All Eighteenth-
Century Theology Butler's included strikes us as-
savouring too much of the Old Bailey. We need not
scruple to think of the future life as a state of
reward or punishment, but we shall avoid the
Eighteenth-Century tendency to look upon Religion
chiefly as a powerful assistance to the police. We
shall think of the highest life as something which
begins here and now, as worth having for its own
sake (" he that hath the Son hath life ") : we shall
set before men as their primary aim and object the

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GOD AND MAN

promotion of the Kingdom of God in present human
society, while we shall look forward to the future life
as continuing the process of divine education for
human character which is begun by the struggles and
efforts, the joys and the sorrows, of the present.

252

XI
THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH 1

"Add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge.""

2 PETER i. 5.

IT is being very generally said that the Church is.
losing, or at least is in great danger of losing, its hold
upon the nation. The most enthusiastic friends of
the Church seem as eager to proclaim that fact as
its most contemptuous foes. Among the friends the
only difference lies in their diagnoses of the disease
and in the remedies which they would prescribe. I
am not at all disposed to swell the chorus of criti-
cism. Many of the complaints against the Church,
both those which come from friends and those which,
come from foes, are, I venture to think, exaggerated
and overdone.

And in particular there has been far too much
abuse of the clergy. In all ages the Church and the
clergy have more or less fallen below their magni-
ficent ideals. That is inevitable. But after all it
may, I believe, fairly be said that the standard of
devotion and self-sacrifice on the part of the parochial
clergy (as one who has never borne the burdens of
the parochial clergyman, I may be allowed to say it)
has never been higher at least since the days of
persecution.

But there is one respect in which the criticism has
hardly been overdone. The Church has not been
bold enough in meeting the intellectual difficulties of
the age ; and that failure has more to do with other
kinds of inefficiency than is sometimes supposed. It
is possible to exaggerate the Church's lack of influence,
in other directions : all that we heard during the
War about the unconscious Christianity of the
average soldier is so much testimony to the direct
or indirect effects of the Church's work. The

1 Preached in Solihull Church, October 9, 1921. Reprinted with modi-
fications from Jesus, Human and Divine, pp. 71-93.

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GOD AND MAN

unconscious Christianity of the many must be the
outcome of conscious or half-conscious Christianity
in the comparatively few.

But that the Church has not the hold that we
should like it to have over the intellectual life of the
age is a proposition which few will dispute. The
ideas about the universe which find expression not
merely in the works of philosophers and professed
scholars, but in those of popular novelists and men
of letters and cultivated journalists, are rarely the
same as those which we most often hear assumed in
the pulpit, the Diocesan Conference, and the religious
newspaper. It is just the most religious people who
are most eager to proclaim, and even to exaggerate,
this discord. Do they not almost expect a man of
science to be an agnostic, and a layman of learning
to be at all events not a very orthodox Christian ?
Is it not almost enough to discredit a man's opinion
in many religious circles to call him a Professor
even though he may chance to be also in Holy
Orders ?

And it would be a great mistake to suppose that
this failure to hold the mind of the age is to be
observed only among more or less academic people.
Our army chaplains and ex-chaplains know better.
Here are the words of Mr. Studdert-Kennedy, better
known to the soldier as " Woodbine Willie " :

" It is awful to realise that when one stands up to
preach Christ the soldier feels that you are de-
fending a whole ruck of obsolete theories and
antiquated muddles."

And this discord between average Church teaching
and average lay opinion is not confined to those who
have absolutely turned their back upon the Churches
and their ordinances. A very large proportion of
those who still come to church do not expect to have
their doubts and difficulties met in the Church's
official teaching. They go to church to satisfy their

254

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH

devotional needs, and to get practical help for
right living, but for intellectual guidance they look
elsewhere.

Now I am by no means assuming that, when there
is this collision between the ideas of the official
Church on the one hand and the more intellectual,
the more educated, or more thoughtful laity on the
other, the truth must lie wholly with those who are
most alienated from the Church's point of view. Far
from it. At a tune when knowledge is advancing by
enormous strides, when specialism is carried so far
that the students of any one branch of knowledge
have little time to acquaint themselves with any
other, it is quite natural that there should be much
one-sided intellectual development ; that those whose
, studies are concerned with matter should often be
blind to the spiritual side of our nature and
its needs ; that, when in so many directions old
beliefs are breaking down, the truths which were
enshrined in or associated with those beliefs should
"be overlooked.

The ideas on such subjects of the " man in the
.street," or even of the man of science or the man of
letters with no special interest in theology or philo-
sophy, are often as crude and ill-informed as those
of the uninstructed religious person. The mere
existence of doubt or anti-religious opinion is not
necessarily to the Church's discredit. But surely
ihe existence of this discord should be a matter of
.grave concern to the Churches and to every individual
Christian, and all efforts to put an end to it welcomed
and encouraged, whatever mistakes may be made,
whether in the direction of excessive conservatism or
of excessive liberalism.

Can it seriously be said that the Church is doing its
duty in this matter ? Can it be said that there is in
the Church of to-day a passionate love of truth, a
desire to pursue truth to the uttermost, a profound
respect for honest thought and inquiry ? Would a

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GOD AND MAN

visitor from Mars who attended our Church
Assemblies, or dipped into our religious newspapers,
or into the letters and articles written from the
Church point of view in secular newspapers, be
likely to conclude that an eager disposition to wel-
come new truth from whatever quarter it comes, to
enquire into new opinions or alleged discoveries, to-
be scrupulously fair to opponents would such a
visitor be likely to note these qualities as conspicuous,
features in the average religious mind of our age ?
Would he not probably carry away the impression
that doubt and intellectual open-mindedness, the
patient search for truth and the willingness to face
truth when found, were regarded by too many-
religious persons as extremely dangerous things, if
not as deadly sins ?

What is the education which we give to our
clergy ? Even when their previous general education
has been good, what professional education do they
get ? Are the great problems which a clergyman has.
to face so easy that, whereas a doctor requires five
years' professional education at the very least, two-
years' or, in the case of graduates, one year's study
at a theological college is sufficient to fit a man even
for meeting the difficulties which any intelligent
artisan at the present day would be capable of
suggesting to him ? And what is the standard of
competency secured by the examination for Holy-
Orders ? I think I could give you a fairly correct
idea of the amount of knowledge insisted on for the
clergy of course I am only speaking of the indispens-
able minimum by saying that it is probably equi-
valent to the knowledge of Science and Medicine
expected of a trained nurse, with the difference that,
the nurse's information is tolerably up to date as far
as it goes, while the parson's is by no means always,
so. Happily many of us go on reading and thinking-
after we are ordained ; but it cannot be assumed
that the majority in any profession will succeed in.

256

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH

making up by private effort for the defects of their
professional training.

I do not hesitate to say that one of the greatest
needs perhaps the greatest need of the Church
to-day is an improvement in the education of the
clergy, and a changed attitude towards intellectual
questions on the part, not only of the clergy, but of
the religious laity. Without that, not all the devo-
tion of the laborious parochial clergy, not all the
subscriptions of the benevolent laity, not all the new
organisations and machineries Assemblies, Finance
Boards, new dioceses, and the rest will avail to
enable the Church to hold its own and do its work
in the world of to-day. And observe, there is no
safer historical generalisation than this that the
opinions which are accepted by the more intellectual
people sooner or later spread to the population
generally. A Church that has lost its hold over the
intellect of the age will not long retain its hold over
its emotional life or its practical activities.

I know that there will be some people who will
meet these suggestions with a simple negative.
There are a few people who will say " The teaching
of the Church has always been and must always be
the same. If the world will not accept the Church's
message, so much the worse for the world. The
clergy are not to be blamed because they refuse to
water down their teaching to suit the infidelity of the
age ; and this infidelity, it will further be suggested,
is only the outcome of the peculiar and exceptional
wickedness which distinguishes this period of the
world's history from all others." Or perhaps the
whole matter will be summarily disposed of by the
suggestion that all new ideas in theology were made
in Germany, and therefore must be wrong.

As regards certain things, of course every Christian
must admit that there is an unchangeable basis of
the Church's teaching. " Jesus Christ is the same
yesterday, to-day, and for ever." But unfortunately

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GOD AND MAN

the Church is constantly mistaking for the essentials
of its faith things which are mere accidents of it. It
is a profound historical mistake a pure mistake of
fact to suppose that the Church's teaching has
always been the same on all subjects. The Church
would have been dead long ago if it had been, and
the promise that the Holy Spirit would ever lead the
Church on to new truth would have failed. The
Church has always and most of all in the ages in
which its influence has been most profound and most
vital been adapting its teaching to meet the
advance of knowledge in other directions. I could
easily show you, had I the time, that the Church's
teaching has never been exactly the same during
any two centuries of its existence except perhaps in
the very darkest of the dark ages.

I will not attempt to illustrate that proposition
from the Church's earlier history. But I should like
to remind you of the changes which have taken place
in average religious teaching within the memory of
men who are not yet very old. The most funda-
mental of all these changes has been an altered way
of looking at the Bible. Many of us were brought up
to believe that every word of the Bible was true from
the first chapter of Genesis to the last of Revelation.

Where is the instructed theologian of any school
who teaches that now ? The most conservative
scholarly theologian of the present day is, I suppose,
Dr. Wace, the aged Dean of Canterbury. What does
he say about the Bible ? I heard him speak on the
subject at a Diocesan Conference at Birmingham
some few years ago. He told us that the Bible is
substantially true from cover to cover. Substantially
true. There is a great difference between " sub-
stantially true " and " literally true, every word of
it, equally in all its parts," in matters of Science and
of History as well as in matters of Spiritual Truth.
And if the Dean were to have set forth these par-
ticulars the unscientific account of Creation, details

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THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH

of history, minor contradictions, and the like
which he would probably admit, the applause with
which that utterance was greeted would perhaps
have been a little qualified.

At all events, even such admissions would probably
have seemed startling enough to our grandfathers.
We used to be told that, if you admit one mistake,
if you admit that the world took more than six days
to make, and that the fossils do not lie, or that the
story of Jonah is only a parable, you will have no
ground left for believing in the Divinity of our Lord.
Who would talk like that now ?

And of course everyone knows that the great
majority of modern scholars whether they call
themselves High-Churchmen or Evangelicals, Mod-
erates or Liberals go much further than the
venerable Dean of Canterbury would go in accepting
the conclusions of modern Biblical criticism. The
imperfect and progressive character of the Old Testa-
ment revelation is very widely admitted. Instead of
being a book equally authoritative in all its parts,
the Bible is regarded as the record of God's gradual
self-revelation of Himself to the soul of man a
gradual self -revelation leading up to and culminating
in that full, sufficient, and (in a sense) final Revelation
of Himself which God has made to the world in our
Lord Jesus Christ.

And this change of attitude towards the Bible has
brought with it another. No modern theologian has
done more to help men of this age to retain their
belief in the fundamental truths of Christianity in
spite of our changed attitude towards the Bible than
Dr. Charles Gore, at one time Bishop of Birmingham.
And when in the book of essays called Lux Mundi,
which appeared twenty-eight years ago, he attempted
to show how it was possible to accept the views of
modern scholars as to the date and authorship of
Scriptural books, without giving up his firm belief in
the Catholic faith, he found himself met with the

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GOD AND MAN

difficulty that our Lord Himself apparently sanctions
the traditional views. Our Lord treats David as the
author of the noth Psalm, which modern critics
assign to a much later date, and possibly assumes
that the Pentateuch was written by Moses. And
therefore Dr. Gore felt driven to revive the ancient
view as to the limitation in our Lord's human know-
ledge, which had practically been forgotten by most
religious people, though it had never been formally
condemned.

The moment we come seriously to think of it, we
must surely recognise that the idea of the incarnation
of God in a human soul really implies that the
Incarnate submitted to those limitations which are
inherent in the nature of humanity. That was no
new doctrine. It is asserted by some of the great
Fathers of the Church. It is one that can only be
denied by contradicting our Lord's own assertion
that He did not know the day or the hour of the
Judgment, and the Gospel statement that He in-
creased in wisdom. The doctrine was old enough,
and orthodox enough, but that did not prevent
violent attacks in the Church papers upon the
orthodoxy and the honesty of Dr. Gore. By many
he was told that his plain duty was to resign his
position as a clergyman, and so on. At the present
day there are probably very few bishops and still
fewer theologians who do not agree with him on this
subject.

Let me take one more illustration of the change
that has already taken place in average clerical
opinion. I can remember the time when any doubt
about the eternity of future punishment of literal
endless torture was something that could only be
whispered or hinted at. To avow such doubts was
the note of the thorough-going Broad-Churchman.
Maurice lost his professorship for it in 1853. Dean
Farrar was fiercely attacked for boldly preaching
against the old view in 1877. At the present day I

260

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH

find that in any ordinary clerical gathering you may
assume the gospel of eternal hope with general
agreement ; or at all events it is treated as a perfectly
allowable opinion.

Now in the face of such changes it is too late to
contend that the Church has always taught the same
things, and that the clergyman who departs one
hair's breadth from this or that ancient formula has
no place in the ministry of the Church. We do
wrong to think of Christianity as a fixed, stereotyped
body of doctrine. It is, and has always been, a
living, growing, evolving thing, ever reaching out
after and absorbing new truth and pushing on to
higher and higher conceptions of God, and fuller and
wider insight into the true and eternal meaning of the
full revelation of Himself which God once for all
made of Himself in the Person of our Lord Jesus
Christ.

But someone will say, " If the Church has already
so far remodelled and adapted its teaching to the
new light which God has given us, why do you
complain that she is not facing the difficulties of the
age ? Why is there still this discrepancy between the
teaching of the pulpit and the mind of the age ? "

In answer to this suggestion I would say two
things :

(i) Though these ideas which are most clearly
opposed to modern science and modern Biblical
scholarship have been silently dropped, the contrary
views are very seldom preached with any distinct-
ness. It is only in rather limited circles that the
new ideas have spread. Thousands are kept back
from Christianity because they still suppose that
the clergy teach that every word of the Bible is
historically true, and that all the miracles of the Old
Testament must be accepted just as they stand, that
the morality of the Old Testament is as perfect as
that of the New, and that you cannot be a Christian
without thinking so. That is still assumed in nearly

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GOD AND MAN

all the more popular attacks upon Christianity and
in some of the more educated ones. When by some
accident some view long quite familiar to scholars
finds its way into the newspapers and becomes the
subject of popular controversy, it soon becomes
evident that the ideas even of the most orthodox and
conservative scholars are still not accepted by many
clergymen, and are quite unknown to the letter-
writers and leader-writers in newspapers, who come
forward on such occasions as the champions of the
Church.

(2) And then we cannot assume that the process
of development by which we have all been influenced
to a greater or a lesser extent must cease at the point
where our own personal difficulties may chance to
end. Historical research and theological thought
are continually going on. New problems must be
faced as well as old ones. Younger people will ask
questions which their fathers were contented not to
ask. And their difficulties cannot be met, if every
fresh attempt to explain an ancient formulary, every
departure from conventional opinion, is to be met by
yells of condemnation from a thousand pulpits and
a hundred local newspapers. You will observe I say
" departure from conventional opinion." For very
often the opinion attacked is not opposed even to the
letter of the Church's formularies. Sometimes it is
really part of the orthodox teaching of the Church,
and those who attack it are the real heretics. When,
for instance, people are shocked at being told that
our Lord had a human soul and a human will, they
only show that they do not know the Church's own
doctrine. The favourite document of the dog-
matists, the Athanasian Creed, could teach them
better. " Perfect God and perfect man, of a reason-
able soul and human flesh subsisting."

A reasonable soul means, of course, a reasonable
human soul.

But I do not wish to get into the discussion of any

262

THE GREATEST NEED OF THE CHURCH

particular opinions. The great obstacle to a re-
adjustment of the relations between theological
dogma and modern knowledge is not so much any
particular difference of opinion as the existence in
too many Christians of a wholly wrong attitude
towards thought and knowledge, a fierce antagonism
to new opinions that is to say, to any opinions of
which they do not happen to have heard a fixed
conviction that all theological ideas other than the
conventional ones are due to conceit or personal
vanity or gross unspirituahty of mind in those who
suggest them, and a disposition to cry out for some
sort of vengeance against them, even before it is
known what the poor men have actually said.

In the moderate words of one of our most promin-
ent Assistant Chaplains-General during the war, Dr.
Neville Talbot, now Bishop of Pretoria :

" There is a great danger to-day in the exaltation
of religious devotion and activity over love of the
truth. During the last sixty years so much of the
1 best and most intense achievements, whether
Evangelical or Catholic, have been reared on a
basis of reactionary thought."

That this should be altered is one of the greatest, if
not the greatest, need of our Church to-day.

And here, perhaps, I may be asked : " How does
all this concern us ? You have been preaching upon
the duties of the clergy, and we can't reform the
clergy, even if they want reforming." It is a very
great mistake to suppose that these matters concern
the clergy only. Each of you has something to do
to bring his own belief into harmony with whatever
he possesses of modern knowledge. There are many
people whose practical Christian faith would be
immensely strengthened, and its influence over their
lives intensified, if they were to take the trouble to
read and inquire a little more about the Bible and
the truth which it contains. A vague consciousness

263

GOD AND MAN

of difficulties felt, but not faced, is often a great source
of religious indecision and practical inefficiency.

And especially is this duty incumbent upon those
who have in any way to teach others. I am afraid
that the new light has influenced the ordinary currents
of religious teaching in the Christian home, the
Sunday-school, the day-school, the Bible-class, less
even than it has affected the teaching of the pulpit.
Children are still too often taught antiquated views,
the denunciation of which gives an easy triumph to
Mr. Blatchford and the Rationalist Press Association.
Many parents go on teaching children what they do
not quite believe themselves ; or they teach ^them
nothing at all about religion, because they are not
quite sure what they do believe themselves. The
more boldly we face difficulties, the more, I believe,
we shall discover the unique and imperishable value
of that supreme revelation of God's nature which
has been made to us in our Lord Jesus Christ.

The revelation is, in a sense, always the same ;
but the apprehension of it is gradual and progressive.
Over and over again it has been discovered that the
true meaning and significance of Christ's teaching
and work become all the clearer and all the more
life-giving when the incrustations of human traditions
have been stripped off. Let us try to take seriously
the doctrine that the Holy Spirit is teaching some-
thing something important and something new
to the Church of our own generation ; and let us
each in proportion to his leisure, his vocation, and
his opportunities try to discover what it is, and to
do what we can to communicate to others whatever
measure of truth God has revealed to us and to the
Church of our day. Now, as in former times, the
Holy Spirit of God is saying to us : " He that hath
an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the
Churches."

264

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